‘NASA seeks ideas to convert CO2 into useful compounds’

NASA has launched a public competition seeking novel solutions to turn carbon dioxide into useful compounds that may help future astronauts exploring Mars.

When astronauts begin exploring Mars, they will need to use local resources, freeing up launch cargo space for other mission-critical supplies, NASA said in a statement.

Carbon dioxide is one resource readily abundant within the Martian atmosphere.

NASA’s new CO2 Conversion Challenge is a public competition seeking novel ways to convert carbon dioxide into useful compounds, the US space agency said.

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Such technologies will allow us to manufacture products using local, indigenous resources on Mars, and can also be implemented on Earth by using both waste and atmospheric carbon dioxide as a resource, NASA said.

“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, 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,” Roman said.

Carbon and oxygen are the molecular building blocks of sugars. Developing efficient systems that can produce glucose from carbon dioxide will help advance the emerging field of biomanufacturing technology on Earth, NASA said.

While sugar-based biomaterials are inexpensively made on Earth by plants, this approach cannot be easily adapted for space missions because of limited resources such as energy, water and crew time, it said.

The CO2 Conversion Challenge aims to help find a solution.

Energy rich sugars are preferred microbial energy sources composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

They could be used as the feedstock for systems that can efficiently produce a variety of items.

Glucose is the target sugar product in this challenge because it is the easiest to metabolise, which will optimise conversion efficiency, according to NASA.

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The competition is divided into two phases. During Phase 1, teams must submit a design and description of a conversion system that includes details of the physical-chemical approaches to convert carbon dioxide into glucose.

NASA will award up to five teams $ 50,000 each, to be announced in April next year, the US space agency said.

Phase 2, the system construction and demonstration stage, is contingent on promising submissions in Phase 1 that offer a viable approach to achieving challenge goals.

Phase 2 will carry a prize purse of up to $ 750,000, for a total challenge prize purse of $ 1 million, according to NASA.