NASA awarded a total of $250,000 to five teams in the initial phase of the CO2 Conversion Challenge. Our team led by Mike, Stefano, and Yifan is one of the winers! Congratulations!
The purpose of the challenge is to convert carbon dioxide into glucose in order to eventually create sugar-based fuel, food, medicines, adhesives and other products. While sugar-based biomaterials are created on Earth by plants, this is not practical for space missions because of limited resources such as energy, water and crew time. This capability would let future Martian explorers manufacture products using carbon dioxide in the Red Planet’s atmosphere.
