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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If you found water that was more than two billion years old, would your first instinct be to drink it? One scientist did exactly that after finding the oldest water ever discovered on the planet. A team from the University of Toronto, led by Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar, came across an incredible find while studying a Canadian mine in 2016. Tests showed that the water source they unearthed was between 1.5 billion and 2.64 billion years old. Given that it was completely isolated, it marked the oldest ever found on Earth. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Remarkably, the tests also uncovered that there was once life present in the water. Speaking to BBC News, professor Sherwood Lollar said: “When people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock. “But in fact it’s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of litres per minute – the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated.” Discussing the presence of life in the water, Sherwood Lollar added: “By looking at the sulphate in the water, we were able to see a fingerprint that’s indicative of the presence of life. And we were able to indicate that the signal we are seeing in the fluids has to have been produced by microbiology - and most importantly has to have been produced over a very long time scale. “The microbes that produced this signature couldn’t have done it overnight. This has to be an indication that organisms have been present in these fluids on a geological timescale.” The professor also revealed that she tried the water for herself – but how did it taste? “If you’re a geologist who works with rocks, you’ve probably licked a lot of rocks,” Sherwood Lollar told CNN. She revealed that the water was "very salty and bitter" and "much saltier than seawater." 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.