Japanese astronaut disciplined for falsifying scientific research data

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) says a team of researchers faked the results of an experiment to simulate everyday life aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The head of this research team is an astronaut from JAXA, named Satoshi Furukawa, 58 years old. He will be subject to disciplinary action for falsifying data, according to Japanese media reports.

The experiment mentioned above was conducted between 2016 and 2017, involving 40 people. All have undergone the process of living confined to a closed environment to simulate what astronauts would experience during space flights.

Participants spent about two weeks at a facility in Tsukuba, a city northeast of Tokyo. After that time, their stress levels and mental health will be assessed by the supervising researchers. That was the original plan, but instead, the two researchers responsible for conducting the interviews fabricated the data, compiled psychological assessments without actually conducting the interviews, and writing. diagnoses of the participants. The researchers also claimed that three of them conducted interviews, when in fact only two of them.

JAXA began investigating the study results in November 2020 when it realized something was wrong with the data and subsequently halted the $1.4 million trial. The participating researchers stated that they were “too busy” to spend enough time collecting data for the experiment, according to JAXA vice president Hiroshi Sasaki.

The Japanese space agency will reprimand 58-year-old astronaut Furukawa, who was responsible for overseeing the experiment as a project supervisor. However, since Mr. Furukawa himself was not directly involved in the data manipulation, his upcoming mission to the ISS in 2023 will not be affected.

JAXA also announced that it will consider returning funding received from the country’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for the test.

“We offer our deepest apologies and will do our best to prevent this from happening again.” Mr. Sasaki said in a press conference last Friday.

Refer KyodoNews, Gizmodo