Would you sign up to live in isolation for a year, all in the name of furthering scientific research? Probably not, we’re guessing, but that’s exactly what four NASA volunteers have agreed to do over the next 12 months. The participants will live in an environment created to simulate conditions on the surface of Mars as part of NASA's Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog for 378 days. The people involved are research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The simulation has been built at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and will see the four volunteers undertake a series of tasks as part of the exercise. Data collected over the next 12 months will help to inform future missions to send astronauts to Mars. During that time, the guests will take part in activities such as crop growing as well as simulated spacewalks and other operations. The 3D-printed hub they’ll spend their time in contains a kitchen, sleeping areas, two bathrooms as well as work and recreation spaces. The mission will also see the guests faced with simulated obstacles, which are designed to test responses to equipment failure, communication delays and other issues. Speaking at a recent briefing, the mission's principal investigator at NASA Grace Douglas said: “Thank you all for your dedication to exploration. Our best wishes go with you." Haston also spoke, calling her fellow participants an "amazing group of dedicated individuals who feel very passionate about space exploration and science." "The crew has worked so hard this month to get ready for this mission," Haston added. "It has been very special to be a part of such a tremendous group of scientists and specialists from a diverse set of backgrounds working together to bring CHAPEA 1, the first of three missions, to reality." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Scientists have found a vast planet, so large that it should not exist. The planet appears to be too big for its sun, and therefore calls into question our understanding of how planets and solar systems form, according to the researchers who found it. The planet is more than 13 times as massive as Earth. It orbits around a star that is nine times less massive than our Sun. As such, the ratio between the two of them is 100 times higher than it is between the Earth and our sun. It is the first time that a planet with such a high mass has been seen orbiting a star with such a low amount of mass. And the discrepancy is so large that scientists thought such a planet could not exist. “This discovery really drives home the point of just how little we know about the universe,” said Suvrath Mahadevan, from Penn State. “We wouldn’t expect a planet this heavy around such a low-mass star to exist.” When stars are formed, out of large clouds of gas and dust, that material sticks with the star as a disc that orbits around it. Planets can then form out of that extra material, and go on to make a planetary system like our own. But science would suggest that the disc around the star in the new paper, known as LHS 3154, would not have enough material to make a planet so large. “The planet-forming disc around the low-mass star LHS 3154 is not expected to have enough solid mass to make this planet,” Mahadevan said. “But it’s out there, so now we need to reexamine our understanding of how planets and stars form.” The finding is reported in a new paper, ‘A Neptune-mass exoplanet in close orbit around a very low mass star challenges formation models’, published in Science. Read More Astronomers find unprecedented ‘disc’ around distant planet Planet too big for its sun ‘is challenging the idea of how solar systems form’ Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets are punching holes in edge of space

Slack has been hit by unusual errors that have seen messages disappear and duplicate. Problems have been reported by a “small percentage” of users, according to the office chat app. Those affected said they were seeing messages duplicate or not send, especially in groups. The company acknowledged the problem and said that it was investigating. “We’re receiving reports that a small percentage of users are experiencing issues with loading and sending messages,” it said in a post to its status page. “We’re actively looking into this, and we’ll report back as more information becomes available.” Tracking website Down Detector confirmed the issues, with a relatively small number of reports from users that the app was not working as expected. It was unclear why the problems were only affecting some users, and what marked out those who were hit by it. It was also unclear whether there was any easy way for those affected to make the app work as normal again. The outage comes just a few days after another major outage at the office chat app. This time around, the problems came at the end of the working day in the UK, and before lunchtime in the US. Read More Slack is down Photoshop unveils ‘extraordinary’ AI that transforms your pictures with a text prompt ChatGPT creator issues stark warning on AI

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