NASA is offering $1 million in a new type of space race — to convert carbon dioxide into other compounds that can potentially be used to sustain life on Mars.
Dubbed the “CO2 Conversion Challenge,” the space agency is looking for scientists to figure out how to transform the carbon dioxide that’s abundant on the Red Planet into glucose.
“Enabling sustained human life on another planet will require a great deal of resources and we cannot possibly bring everything we will need. We have to get creative,” said Monsi Roman, program manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program. “If we can transform an existing and plentiful resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products, the space – and terrestrial – applications are endless.”
Carbon, oxygen and hydrogen molecules are the building blocks of sugars, which NASA said “are preferred microbial energy sources” because they’re easy to metabolize.
The contest is divided into two phases.
NASA is offering $50,000 each to up to five teams that submit a design and description of a conversion system that includes “details of the physical-chemical approaches to convert carbon dioxide into glucose.”
The second phase, the system construction and demonstration stage, carries a prize of up to $750,000.
The registration ends on Jan. 24, 2019. The finalists will be announced in April 2019.
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