Lifetime achievement: Professor Martin Severs

A University of Portsmouth professor has been given a lifetime achievement award in recognition of his efforts to help save lives and alleviate suffering worldwide.

Professor Martin Severs, Associate Clinical Dean in the University’s School of Health Sciences and Social Work, was given the award by the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) in Stockholm.

Professor Severs’ major contribution to healthcare was the vision and subsequent development of an international organisation to produce and maintain a common language for healthcare computers worldwide. Called SNOMED CT, its main objective is to improve healthcare by removing language barriers.

Colleagues who nominated him for the lifetime achievement award said he had devoted nearly a decade of “super-human efforts” to advancing the cause of international clinical terminology standardisation as a means for enhancing the health of the world’s citizens. They said his energy, perseverance and creativity overcame all obstacles in the complex inter-country negotiations required to establish the organisation globally.

Professor Severs established the IHTSDO in 2007 with seven countries and it has now grown to 19 countries using the platform to ensure seamless clinical care for patients.

He said: “SNOMED CT means GPs, hospitals, nurses and social workers can see the same information in the same language no matter what computing system they are using. You could say it will become the computer language of health.”

The platform is a computer readable terminology of health concepts, which means the terms doctors and nurses use for a patients’ illnesses can be coded and read by computers which store the patients’ electronic records. This enables health data to be shared not only between clinicians and patients but also between the computers they use.

Within the UK, the system works by acting as a reference terminology, or dictionary, for different medical records and populating messages between them and supporting decision support tools applied to them. An example of how it works abroad is if an English-speaking patient travels to Spain their health records are viewable over the platform by a Spanish-speaking doctor in Spanish.

Professor Severs said: “Increasingly doctors are collecting data electronically on their patients and in the past, if other healthcare workers needed to read a patient’s history, they would often not be able to view it because different computer systems contained different data standards.”

Professor Severs was the founding chairman of IHTSDO which runs SNOMED CT and spent five years on the organisation’s management board. He is now the clinical lead and a panel member for the Caldicott Independent Review of information governance in the health and social care system in England.

Upon receiving the award Professor Severs said: “I am proud and humble in equal amounts; proud that I have achieved something others value and humbled that I was not worthy of the degree of warmth and gratitude given to me.”

Professor Gioia Pescetto, Dean of Portsmouth Business School; Keith Warburton, from SannamS4; and Joe Docherty, Director of the International Office sign the agreement to extend the University’s outreach and recruitment across India

The University of Portsmouth has signed an agreement establishing, for the first time, a permanent presence in India to recruit new students.

The venture is jointly funded by the International Office and Portsmouth Business School and developed in partnership with Indian market entry experts SannamS4 in New Delhi.

Under the venture starting early next year, a Portsmouth representative working from a SannamS4 base in Mumbai will explore new opportunities in India to promote the University’s undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and build relationships with potential partner institutions.

The University’s International Director Joe Docherty said the agreement represented a pivotal shift in the University’s recruitment strategy in India and underlined the University’s continuing commitment to this vibrant market.

Portsmouth Business School is jointly funding the venture to raise awareness across the sub-continent of its wide-ranging portfolio of programmes, including undergraduate Business and Management programmes and the AMBA-accredited MBA with Business Placement, which gives students an opportunity to do paid work as part of their studies .

Mr Docherty said: “This venture represents an exciting opportunity for the University of Portsmouth to raise its profile in India and to explore new opportunities in recruitment and institutional cooperation.

“We are looking forward to what we are sure will be a highly successful collaboration with SannamS4 in this venture.”

Astronomers at the University of Portsmouth, the only UK institution to be involved, have  been part of an international effort to measure the rate the universe was

An illustration showing how SDSS-III was able to measure the distant Universe.
Light rays from distant quasars (dots at left) are partially absorbed as they pass through clouds of intergalactic hydrogen gas (centre). When the light arrives at the spectrograph of the Sloan Foundation 2.5-Meter Telescope (square at right), some has been absorbed, leaving behind a record in the form of a “forest” of small absorption lines in the observed spectrum.
These lines can be interpreted to make a map of the gas along the line of sight between us and the quasar. By examining light from thousands of quasars all over the sky, astronomers can make a detailed three-dimensional map of the distant universe.
In this illustration, the dots at the far left are quasars, and the thin lines show light rays that left those quasars more than 10 billion years ago. Yellow dots are quasars that had been measured by prior projects of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. By measuring the spectra from ten times as many quasars in this range (red dots), BOSS can reveal the large-scale structure of the early universe in much greater detail.
Illustration credit: Zosia Rostomian, LBNL; Nic Ross, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, LBNL; and Springel et al, Virgo Consortium and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

expanding in its youth, just three billion years after the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is estimated to have happened 13.75 billion years ago, so this study is going back to when the universe was very young. This is the first time scientists have been able to map so far into the past.

Dr Mat Pieri, Marie Curie research fellow at University of Portsmouth and co-author of the study said: “We already know about the universe in its infancy using the afterglow of the Big Bang.

“We have seen the universe reach maturity by looking at the distribution of distant galaxies in the second half of its history.

“Only now are we finally seeing its adolescence by exploring the distribution of gas on the largest scales in the first half of its history, just before it underwent a growth spurt.”

In the last five billion years the universe has started to rapidly expand, due to a mysterious repulsive force that scientists have named ‘dark energy’. This study, undertaken by astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), looks at the universe when it was young, and its growth was being slowed by the effects of gravity.

Dr Pieri said: “If we think of the universe as a roller coaster, then today we are rushing downhill, gaining speed as we go.

“Our new measurement tells us about the time when the universe was climbing the hill — still being slowed by gravity.

“It looks like the roller coaster crested the hill just about seven billion years ago, and we’re still going.”

The results were presented in a paper submitted to the journal ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics’ and posted today on the arXiv.org preprint site.

A graph showing how the Universe’s expansion rate has changed over the last ten billion years.
Until recently, three-dimensional maps by BOSS and other surveys were able to measure the regular distribution of galaxies back to only about five and a half billion years ago, a time when the expansion of the Universe was already accelerating.
The numbers along the bottom of the graph show the time in the Universe’s past, in billions of years. The vertical scale (y-axis) shows the expansion rate of the Universe; higher means the Universe was expanding faster. These older measurements appear as data points toward the right of the graph.
The new SDSS-III measurements, shown as the data point to the far left, have now probed the structure of the early Universe at a time when expansion was still slowing down.
Credit: Zosia Rostomian, LBNL, and Nic Ross, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, LBNL

The new measurement makes use of the clustering of intergalactic hydrogen gas in the distant universe. We can see this gas because it absorbs some light from quasars lying behind. When we measure the spectrum of a quasar, we see not only the light emitted by the quasar, but also what happened to that light in its long journey to Earth. When we look at a quasar’s spectrum, we can see how the intervening gas absorbs some of the quasar’s light. Measuring this absorption — a phenomenon known as the Lyman-alpha forest — yields a detailed picture of the gas between the quasar and us.

Professor Will Percival, Professor of Cosmology at University of Portsmouth said:  “It’s a very useful technique: we’re essentially measuring the shadows cast by gas along a series of lines, each billions of light-years long.

“The tricky part is combining all those one-dimensional maps. The problem is like trying to recognise an object from a picture that’s been painted on the quills of a porcupine.”

This technique uses so called “baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO)”: echoes frozen into matter soon after the Big Bang, as a “standard ruler” to compare the size of the universe at various points in its history. This was pioneered by SDSS in 2005 using the locations of galaxies, but using that ruler comes with its own difficulties because galaxies that are far away are also very faint.

Last year, astronomers used the first 10,000 quasars from SDSS-III’s Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) to make the first large-scale map of the structure of the faraway “Lyman-alpha forest” gas. As enormous as that map was, it was still not large enough to detect the subtle variations of BAOs. But the new map is big enough — it measures the Lyman-alpha forest using light from 50,000 quasars all over the sky.

“No place in the universe is really empty. There is gas in even the most remote parts of the universe and we have used it to measure how the universe expands. “ said Dr Pieri.

“This expansion is telling us that there is more than just gas out there – it seems that space itself comes with its own energy and the more space you have, the more of this ‘dark energy’ there is.”

The team’s new measurement of the BAOs, combined with measurements at other points in the universe’s history, paints a picture of how the universe has evolved over its history. The picture that emerges is consistent with our current understanding of the universe — that dark energy is a constant part of space throughout the cosmos. What is fascinating about the new result is that, for the first time, we see how dark energy worked at a time before the universe’s current acceleration started.

The Lyman alpha forest technique is itself in its youth. Professor Bob Nichol, said: “Our goal for BOSS was to measure the expansion of the Universe. We planned to make that measurement in two ways — one a sure thing and one a risky new idea.

“It’s really exciting that, thanks to the dedicated work of so many people, we know that both methods work. We have shown that the Lyman-alpha forest can accurately measure the expansion of the Universe when it was only one-fifth its current age.”

SDSS-III will continue to learn more about dark energy as it collects more than a million and half galaxies and more than 160,000 quasars by the end of the survey.  Now that the Lyman-alpha technique is no longer just a risky idea, SDSS-III will make it a standard method by which astronomers explore the nature of the faraway Universe

Star trails from a long exposure image of the Blanco telescope in Chile. Credit: T. Abbott & CTIO/NOAO/AURA/NSF

Scientists from Portsmouth are today joining cosmologists from around the world in Chile to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and the formal dedication of its Dark Energy Survey camera.

The observatory is the focus of the Dark Energy Survey, an international project to answer one of cosmology’s greatest mysteries – why the expansion of the universe is speeding up rather than being slowed by gravity.

To help solve the mystery the observatory is home to a 570-megapixel camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created. The size of a telephone box, it will, for the first time, capture light from over 100,000 galaxies up to eight billion light years away.

Dr Marco Bruni, Reader in Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, will represent the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the ceremony.

Dr Bruni said: “Our involvement with the Dark Energy Survey is huge. The institute of Cosmology and Gravitation has invested hundreds of thousands of pounds and many members of staff have devoted their research to trying to understand Dark Energy.

“Thanks to recent research we now know that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate and that Dark Energy is the source of this acceleration. However we still don’t understand what Dark Energy is.

“Dark Energy makes up about 70 per cent of today’s Universe and so understanding it is crucial and will lead us to a new view of physics and of the Universe.”

The Dark Energy Survey will undertake the largest galaxy survey ever attempted and use that data to study four probes of Dark Energy – galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing. This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment.

The survey will also provide important information about the evolution of galaxies throughout the Universe’s history and is expected to begin after the camera is fully tested, in about a month.

Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration include four astrophysicists from Portsmouth and others from University College London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sussex and Nottingham. The construction of the DES Camera was partially supported by UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council and the project is led by Fermilab in the US.

The Dark Energy Survey is supported by funding from funding agencies the UK, Spain, Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland, the US Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the participating Dark Energy Survey institutions.

Director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Nicole van der Bliek, said at today’s 50^thanniversary celebration in Chile: “Bringing the Dark Energy Camera online and making it available for the astronomical is a milestone in the history of Cerro Tololo. We are very proud that we start the celebration of 50 years of service to astronomers with the dedication of this brand new capability.”

The observatory was founded 50 years ago in 1962 when the mountain top at Cerro Tololo was chosen as the site for the US southern hemisphere observatory complex.

For more information on the Dark Energy Survey, visit: www.darkenergysurvey.org

The event, which attracted 50 graduates who had completed their degrees in the previous three years, was held at the Sheraton Beijing Dongcheng Hotel.

They had studied courses from four faculties – Portsmouth Business School, Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Faculty of Technology.

Graduates at the recent ceremony in Beijing, China

The graduates have gone on to work in a variety of industries, including teaching, finance, graphic design and marketing.

Joe Docherty, International Director of University of Portsmouth said: “We have over one thousand Chinese students at University of Portsmouth, so China is hugely important to us.

“We have held three graduation events in China; in Guangzhou, Shanghai and now Beijing. These give the opportunity for our graduates to celebrate their academic achievements with their families, as well as senior visiting Portsmouth staff.”

Professor John Craven, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth attended the event.

Other representatives from the University were Jenny Morice, Associate Dean (Academic) of Faculty of Creative Cultural Industries, Dr Martin Read, Head of Postgraduate Programmes in Portsmouth Business School, Professor Nick Bennett, of the School of Engineering, Eve Guernier, from the International Office and Wendy Wang, the General Manager of the China Office.

Li Yuan gave a speech on behalf of the graduates. She said: “We all feel very proud and lucky to have studied at the University of Portsmouth. I fell in love with the city at first sight and I now consider the University of Portsmouth as my home in the UK. I think everyone who has studied at the University feels the same.”

A further 30 alumni, who are now based in China, attended the post ceremony dinner.

Professor Ashraf Labib

Some of the world’s greatest disasters could have been avoided if those behind them had experienced more failure, according to research published this week.

The sinking of the Titanic, the loss of the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger, two BP oil refinery explosions with huge loss of life, and the international recall of more than eight million cars by Toyota all have in common an inflated degree of confidence.

Avoiding over-confidence is among a list of ten ‘tools’ based on the outcome of case studies of high profile disasters designed to help organisations and managers understand reasons for disasters.

The study, by Professor Ashraf Labib and Dr Martin Read, of the University of Portsmouth Business School, is published in the journal of Safety Science.

The report’s authors argue that organisations learn more effectively from failures than from successes, but organisations vary at learning from them. They also say that organisations often learn vicariously from the failures and near-failures of other organisations.

Professor Labib said: “A lack of failure can lead to over-confidence and ‘blindness’ to the possibility of problems.

“Some managers and organisations see their role as akin to re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, but disasters, when you study them, are often built on futile exercises that don’t help avoid problems.”

The researchers say that for organisations to successfully avoid major disasters they need to undertake risk and reliability analyses. Policy makers also need to balance their punishment and incentive systems and ensure they are proportional to the significance of hazardous incidents. Underpinning at least five of their ten tools is a clear need for organisations to focus attention on responsibility, communication and priority.

Professor Labib said: “Failures in general and disasters in particular can stimulate a blame culture that can act as a barrier to learning from mistakes, but it is important to note human beings are naturally programmed to learn, whereas organisations are not.”

The authors have identified ten tools based on the root causes of major problems and an understanding of how those problems unfold over time for organisations to use to avoid major failure.

Tool 1: Too much belief in previous successes

Experience with success can be, and has been, counterproductive. Too much belief in the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic meant she set sail with too few life boats and those that were installed were there only to rescue people from other ships.

The Titanic sank in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives.

More recently, NASA’s confidence in its space shuttle programme led them to ignore warning signals related to both the o-rings damage prior to the Challenger disaster in 1986 due to cold weather before launch, and again on the fuel tank foam losses prior to the Columbia disaster in 2003. According to the investigation report NASA’s safety culture had become reactive, complacent and dominated by unjustified optimism.

Tool 2: Coping with growth

The ability or inability to cope with a high rate of growth may be another factor that can contribute to disastrous failures.

Professor Labib said: “Toyota has been regarded as the company against which other organisations benchmark their standards, but recent failures that have led to the massive recall of Toyota vehicles in the US, Europe and China.”

Tool 3: Misunderstanding fashionable paradigms

Misunderstanding of the true meaning behind fashionable paradigms including, for example, ‘lean’ management, which doesn’t mean cutting staff numbers but which it is often thought to mean, has always been a dangerous affair, Professor Labib said. “We have seen this before when Business Process Engineering (BPR) was a fashion, and it ended up by people mocking the acronym of BPR as ‘Bastards Planning Redundancies’.”

Tool 4: Legislation

One of the world’s worst industrial accidents, India’s Bhopal disaster in 1984 in which more than 3,000 died after gas leaked out of a pesticide plant into the surrounding shanty towns, is a classic example of a corporation’s callous disregard for its staff in developing countries, Professor Labib said.

He added: “Twenty-six years after the disaster the officials responsible were prosecuted, but there seems to be a need for something similar to the ‘three strikes and out’ law at a corporate level in terms of serious breaches of safety. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 in the UK is a good step in this direction, where for the first time, organisations can be found guilty of corporate manslaughter as a result of serious management failures resulting in a gross breach of a duty of care.”

Tool 5: The “I operate, you fix” attitude

In old-fashioned maintenance, a prevailing concept among operators was “I operate, You fix”. In other words, maintenance is the responsibility of the maintenance department and operators should deal only with the operation of their own machines. When dealing with a disastrous situation this attitude frequently means most people feel the responsibility for dealing with a disaster lies with someone else.  But it is important everybody, especially top management, is aware that a disaster is not just ‘another issue’ and that their direct involvement is necessary.

Tool 6: No news is good news

Another prevailing attitude is ‘If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it’ which implies a passive attitude towards performing any prevention activity. In many organisations a preventive maintenance schedule might exist but is rarely put into action because breakdowns take priority. In the context of disasters, it seems that the same attitude prevails, Professor Labib said, especially in the private sector, with organisations more worried about current rates of exchange, interest rates and market shares than about the prevention of a disaster.

Tool 7: Bad news, bad person

In many organisations the manager prefers to hear good news and anyone who brings bad news about the malfunction, or even the expectation of it, is at risk of being considered an under-performer. This is similar to the old days in the army, when a soldier bringing news about casualties was in danger of being shot, as if it were his own fault. In the context of a disaster, it is common, for example, for a CEO, when asking about problems, to be told everything is under control.

Tool 8: Everyone’s own machine is the highest priority to him

In traditional maintenance, every machine is the highest priority to its operator, and the one who shouts loudest gets his job done. This lack of a systematic and consistent approach to setting priorities tends to be an important feature when dealing with a disaster. Setting priorities should attract the highest priority among different approaches to dealing with any potential disasters. Questions such as who sets priorities, what criteria are considered, and how to allocate resources based on prioritisation, urgently need to be addressed. 

Tool 9: Solving a crisis is a forgotten experience

It is often the case that solving a problem does not get recorded or documented, but it is beneficial to both organisations and individuals to be able to easily access databases of mistakes or near misses.

Tool 10: Skill levels dilemma

In the maintenance function, the designer of the machine is not usually the one who fixes it, and might not even have the ability to do so. In a crisis, skill levels is a major dilemma because disasters tend to be multi-disciplinary problems needing a multidisciplinary team approach.

Portsmouth is in top 400 universities worldwide and best modern university in UK

The University of Portsmouth is among the top 400 universities in the world and the top modern university in the United Kingdom in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings published today.

The University of Portsmouth is also ranked among the best in Europe.

The University of Portsmouth’s Vice-Chancellor Professor John Craven said Portsmouth’s rise in the rankings was due to continued investment in research, both in terms of staff and laboratory facilities.

He said: “We are delighted to feature so prominently in an independent guide to quality in higher education.

“The World University Rankings are used worldwide by governments and research councils to determine funding decisions.

“Importantly, international ranking and reputation is the most influential factor for prospective students and the Times Higher Education rankings are trusted by prospective students and their parents around the world when choosing where to study.”

Times Higher Education describes their global rankings as the most comprehensive, sophisticated and balanced global rankings in the world. They are collated using 13 performance indicators covering the core missions of a modern global university – research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international activity.

The independent rankings place the United Kingdom second only to the US in terms of world-class universities, with 48 of the UK’s higher education institutions in the top 400 in the world. The US has 111, Germany has 25 and Australia and Canada each have 19.

Portsmouth scored particularly highly in terms of citations, meaning Portsmouth academics’ published research is influential and widely respected. The guide drew on 50 million citations in six million journal articles published over five years.

Director of Research, Professor Tara Dean said Portsmouth’s high position was due partly to a continued rise in the influence Portsmouth researchers have among their peers globally.

She said: “Research is vital for universities and it benefits society, the environment and the global economy. Research also underpins our teaching and our reputation and here, at Portsmouth, it ranges from pure science to computer game design, from fraud prevention to Charles Dickens, with nearly 80 per cent of all our research rated internationally recognised or above.”

The World University Rankings come on the heels of last week’s National Student Satisfaction survey, which ranked the University of Portsmouth joint top of the post-92 universities and in the top 25 of English mainstream universities for student satisfaction. The University has also been rated highly for the quality of its teaching and year on year attracts increasing number of applications from prospective students.

Portsmouth students are among England’s most satisfied

Student satisfaction at the University of Portsmouth has risen to 87 per cent, placing Portsmouth joint top of the post-92 universities and in the top 25 of English mainstream universities.

The results of the 2012 National Student Survey mark the sixth year running Portsmouth students have rated their university above the English national average which, this year, stands at 84 per cent.

The University also scored higher in every category than in 2011, itself a record year.

Nationally, students are more satisfied with their experience at universities or colleges than at any time in the eight years the survey has been run.

The survey is independent and asks students across the UK to give feedback on the quality of their teaching, assessment and feedback, academic support, organisation and management, learning resources and personal development.

Portsmouth staff were particularly well regarded – 92 per cent of students thought staff were good at explaining things; 88 per cent thought staff were enthusiastic about their subject; and 87 per cent were able to contact staff when needed. Students also rated the University Library highly, with 85 per cent saying they were satisfied, again exceeding the sector average.

Nearly 70 per cent of Portsmouth students took part in the survey, including students from the UK and abroad, and those studying full-time and part-time.

Subject areas with exceptionally high student satisfaction, placing them in the top ten per cent nationally for overall satisfaction, include Academic Studies in English (foundation degrees); Building; Journalism; Medical Technology (Radiography); Nursing (Degree in dental hygiene and therapy and diploma in Operating Department Practice); Physical Geography and Environmental Science.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Rebecca Bunting said she was extremely pleased with the results.

She said: “Maintaining a consistently high level of overall student satisfaction is a tremendous achievement and reflects the high quality of teaching and support we give our students.

“The results also highlight areas for improvement and we will continue to listen and make adjustments to ensure our students’ concerns are addressed.”

It wasn’t just their courses that students were satisfied with – 72 per cent said that they were satisfied with the Students’ Union, well above the national average of 66 per cent.

President of the Students’ Union, Godfrey Atuahene Jnr, said: “We are very pleased with the high level of satisfaction shown in the Students’ Union, which places us among the top performing new university students’ unions in the UK. Our performance demonstrates the positive impact of the students’ union in making students’ lives better.

“However, we cannot rest on our laurels and with increased tuition fees we will be fighting hard to ensure that Portsmouth students get the best possible experience at university and good career prospects after it.”

The Unistats website, featuring all the survey data, is to be launched by Vince Cable this morning and will be available at: http://unistats.direct.gov.uk/

Zoomed-in image from the Dark Energy Camera of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365, in the Fornax cluster of galaxies, which lies about 60 million light years from Earth. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration

Light emitted from stars eight billion years ago at the furthest reaches of our universe has been captured and recorded for the first time by the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created.

The Dark Energy Camera is a 570-megapixel camera the size of a telephone box on top of a mountain in Chile. It is the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, able to see light from over 100,000 galaxies up to eight billion light years away in each snapshot, and today scientists announced it had opened its lens for the first time.

The Blanco telescope in Chile as seen from the air. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF

Astronomers from the University of Portsmouth are among those using this camera to undertake the Dark Energy Survey, an international project to hunt for the mysterious Dark Energy, the unknown source of energy causing galaxies to move apart increasingly faster.

Professor Will Percival, of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, co-coordinates the analysis of galaxy clustering observed in the Dark Energy Survey.

He said: “Today we have seen a distant image of space and time that represents the start of an experiment to answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics – why the expansion of the Universe is speeding up.

“The Dark Energy Camera will provide astronomers from all over the world a powerful new tool to explore the outstanding questions of our time, perhaps the most pressing of which is the nature of Dark Energy.”

Dark Energy Camera telescope simulator at Fermilab. Credit: Fermilab

“This will be the largest galaxy survey of its kind, and the galaxy shapes and positions will tell us a great deal about the nature of the physical process that we call Dark Energy, but do not currently understand.”

The Dark Energy Survey will undertake the largest galaxy survey ever attempted and use that data to study four probes of dark energy, galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies, and weak gravitational lensing. This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment. The survey will also provide important information about the evolution of galaxies throughout the Universe’s history.

Zoomed-in image from the Dark Energy Camera of the center of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, which lies about 17,000 light years from Earth. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration

The Dark Energy Camera is the product of eight years of planning and construction by scientists, engineers, and technicians on three continents. The camera’s array of 62 charged-coupled devices have an unprecedented sensitivity to very red light, and along with the Blanco telescope’s large light-gathering mirror (which spans 13 feet across), will allow scientists from around the world to pursue investigations ranging from studies of asteroids in our own Solar System to the understanding of the origins and the fate of the universe.

The Dark Energy Survey is expected to begin in December, after the camera is fully tested, and will take advantage of the excellent atmospheric conditions in the Chilean Andes to deliver pictures with the sharpest resolution seen in a wide-field astronomy survey.

The Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the Blanco telescope in Chile. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration

The Dark Energy Survey is supported by funding from funding agencies the UK, Spain, Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland, the US Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the participating DES institutions.

Professor Percival said: “Getting first light through the Dark Energy Camera is a crucial step in this survey, which will enable us to make new discoveries about the Universe. The results of this survey will bring us closer to understanding the mystery of Dark Energy and what it means for the universe.”

To read a background feature about the Dark Energy Survey: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/september-2012/the-dark-energy-camera-opens-its-eyes

To see the first image captured by the Dark Energy Camera: www.ctio.noao.edu

or here:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/DES-DECam-201209-images.html

Extreme environment experts at the University of Portsmouth tested equipment and the ability of mechanics to withstand the 24-hour darkness at temperatures as low as minus 70 degrees celsius.

An example of Geoff’s thermal imaging

Sir Ranulph Fiennes first undertook a polar expedition in 1986. This December he plans to make “The Coldest Journey” and become the first adventurer to cross Antarctica in winter. He will undertake the crossing on skis, with support from two Caterpillar tractor units towing cabooses and fuel.

The team has had help from University of Portsmouth Department of Sport and Exercise Science, in particular Geoff Long – senior specialist technician in the extreme environments laboratory. Geoff has been involved in monitoring body temperatures and selecting the best possible kit for such extreme temperatures.

Professor Mike Tipton, a noted expert in the field of extreme environments, has also been involved on a consultative level,  along with Dr Jim House who advised on the practical and ethical considerations of testing in extreme cold.

Geoff said: “The University of Portsmouth has been involved every step of the way with this project.

“We supplied support and research both at Portsmouth and at other test facilities in the UK and I participated in a key shake-down of kit in Northern Sweden at a preparation trip earlier this year.”

The team will be covering the route travelled in Sir Fiennes’ Transglobe Expedition of 1979-1982.

The trip will take up to nine months, with the team setting off in December, landing a ship near McMurdo Station, crossing the Ross Ice Shelf and then climbing up the Leverett Glacier onto the Antarctic Plateau at 10,000ft.

Geoff travelled to Sweden with Sir Fiennes earlier this year

The team will then traverse the plateau via the South Pole to reach the coast at the South African National Antarctic Expedition base, at which point they will be retrieved by their ship when the sea ice becomes navigable in the spring.

While they are in the Antarctic, the team will undertake valuable scientific work to support the work that is normally carried out by scientists from across the globe in summer.

Geoff became involved in the project in June 2011, when he helped develop testing protocols in collaboration with Steve Holland, the technical specialist on the project. The team undertook thermal assessments of the best combination of clothing, gloves, footwear and head gear. This included testing the manual dexterity of the gloves the team will use.

Antarctica in full winter experiences 24 hour darkness and an ambient operating temperature range of  minus 40 to  minus 70 degrees celsius. Wind chill will drive down the effective temperature further. Although dark there will be significant light reflected from the moon depending upon its phase and cloud cover. At 10,000ft the thinner air on the plateau will further stress the vehicle engines until they have acclimatised and will also test the expedition crew. The air outside will be dry, 0 per cent humidity, which increases the effects of frostbite.

Geoff and Sir Fiennes suited up for the cold weather

The clothing was initially tested for 48 hours at Millbrook, a cold chamber facility that can generate temperatures of minus 55 degrees celsius. University of Portsmouth provided practical support and safety cover through wireless monitoring of skin temperatures, which went no lower than 8 degrees celsius. Geoff also provided thermal images of the equipment to highlight any performance issues. The team undertook further tests of different kinds of gloves at University of Portsmouth.

In February 2012 Geoff joined a ten-day trip to Arjeplog, Sweden just below the Arctic Circle, supporting initial field trials of clothing and technical equipment. Geoff was also part of a three-man selection team, deciding which mechanics should be asked to join the final expedition. Temperatures dropped below minus 40 for many days and tested people and equipment to their limit, with one team member getting frostbite on his fingers.

Geoff is currently supporting final equipment tests in preparation for the expedition to depart this December.