NASA Is Offerring $1 Million To Turn CO2 Into Sugar (space.com)

NASA is challenging people in the United States to come up with an efficient method to convert carbon dioxide into glucose, a simple sugar. The atmosphere of Mars consists predominantly of CO2 (95%), and glucose is a great fuel for microbe-milking "bioreactors" that could manufacture a variety of items for future settlers of the Red Planet, NASA officials said. Space.com reports: The new competition consists of two phases. During Phase 1, applicants submit a detailed description of their CO2-to-glucose conversion system. Interested parties must register by Jan. 24, 2019 and submit their proposals by Feb. 28, 2019. In April, NASA will announce the selection of up to five finalists from this initial crop, each of whom will receive $50,000. Phase 2 will involve the construction and demonstration of a conversion system. Winning this round is worth $750,000, bringing the competition's total purse to $1 million (assuming five finalists are indeed selected from Phase 1). You don't have to win, or even participate in, Phase 1 to compete in Phase 2. The challenge is open to citizens and permanent residents of the United States; foreign nationals can compete if they're part of a U.S.-based team. To register or learn more, go to the CO2 Conversion Challenge website.

Comments

It would be better

[Vinegar Joe]

To turn CO2 into beer. And pay $1 Billion.

Re:It would be better

[DontBeAMoran]

I say potato, you say vodka.

Plants & CO2 & sunlight

[Alain Williams]

Where do I claim my prize ?

Re:Plants & CO2 & sunlight

[Rei]

The key is "efficient". Sugar crops as a whole generally only yield a fraction of a percent of their received solar energy as sugar. Even just considering the leaves alone, they only net about 5% net sugar yield.

If you want efficiency, you're going to want a direct chemical process. I looked into this at one point and was surprised at how complicated it appears to be to make simple sugars, in terms of the number of requisite steps. Much simpler would probably be a direct conversion to fatty acids; they're carboxylic acids and there's a number of ways to directly synthesize free carboxylic acids from simple raw materials (the main challenge would be specificity)

Re: Plants & CO2 & sunlight

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially something like potatoes. We can science the shit out of this.

Re: Plants & CO2 & sunlight

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd imagine that Mars would be a case where much more intensive cultivation practices would make sense(compared to the cost of shipping pretty much any crazy hydroponics setup looks like a rounding error; and nobody is going to worry too much about your genetically engineered sugar-algae escaping into the pristine Martian oceans; but that space would be at something of a premium:

If you want to use it you need to enclose it(or excavate it and seal as needed), heat it; quite likely light it; and initial reports are that the local soil may have perchlorates that need to be dealt with, in addition to just having absolutely zero accumulated humus, just mineral sand and dust, if you want to try non-hydroponic techniques.

Even so, though, something resembling agriculture (potentially with algae or e coli with plant genes spliced in or something; but using biological sugar synthesis rather than some sort of industrial chemical synthesis: if you are 6 months and a lot of money away from spare parts/fresh reagents/replacement catalyst bits, the ability of organisms to reproduce themselves a new population could come in very handy indeed. Keep a bunch of samples of the relevant organisms in storage(cryo, dried seeds, etc.) and you'll be much more resilient: worst case you have to irradiate the grow vats until the contaminant organisms are cleared out, then restart from a frozen sample.

They have their limits, some very annoying, and our understanding of how to control them is still a work in progress; but it's still the case that biology has effectively delivered replicator nanites a billion-odd years before robotics. And on a planet where you can't just FedEx in spares if something goes unexpectedly badly that could be quite useful.

Re:Plants & CO2 & sunlight

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was a reasonably accessible way to do this more efficiently, plants would use that instead of photosynthesis.

Not necessarily. There is a lot of interesting electrochemistry you can do, if you have access to 12V from photovoltaic panels. Plants do none of that, they never developed any kind of electronics. Generally, you can create energy-rich chemicals, some of which may be useful precursors to sugar synthesis. Also, chemistry may use steps nature avoids - because something too extreme (poisonous, temperature, pressure) is involved. Plants have a narrow temperature range compared to a factory - and do everything at normal atmospheric pressure.

The clorophyll process is likely optimal as-is though.

Re:Plants & CO2 & sunlight

[vtcodger]

Were it easy to convert CO2 (plus Water incidentally) to sugar ( 6CO2 + 6H2O --> C6H12O6 + 6O2)), plants would probably do it more efficiently already. Really, what else do they have to do?

BTW, plants don't have to create glucose per. se.. Starch (Potatoes, Casava, Taro, etc) is easily broken down to glucose by adding a bit of hydrochloric acid.

Where does the Hydrogen come from?

[Grog6]

Glucose has Carbon Hydrogen and Oxygen.

For every 6 CO2 molecules and Water molecules you put in, you get 1x glucose molecule, and 1x O2 molecule.

That's at 100% efficiency.

Water and CO2 are the two lowest energy states for those atoms, so it takes a lot of energy too.

With unlimited solar, anything's possible, but it will be interesting to watch.

Re:Forget Mars

[DarenN]

If a chemical process works on Mars it will almost certainly work here. It's also possible that this is Mars-focused to avoid the inevitable political wrangling if it was directly aimed at climate change.

Re:Grow sugar cane?

[RenderSeven]

Eating other animals has been common for 2 billion years or so. Seems pretty damned natural to me.

Well this would get you most of the way there

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Since making alcohol is pretty much get a bunch of sugar, dissolve it in water, and then get yeast to convert it for you.

Why not on earth?

[DaMattster]

Mars colonization is many, many years away. Since we humans here on earth are belching out CO2 like it's going out of style, why don't we start doing some of that here? Let's make earth more inhabitable.

Re: Why not on earth?

[jd]

I'll agree it's many years away. If you choose an optimal path, it will take 15 years to build a complete self-sustaining environment. It won't be cheap, but if you spend what it takes, that's what it will take.

That's arguably many.

Fixing the Earth requires fossil fuels to be abandoned by 2030 at the latest and around 1960s level by the end of this decade. Otherwise, even with geoengineering, it can't be done.

It also requires that, by 2050, the global population is down to 1 billion on the surface (and no more than an additional 3 billion subsurface). Again, if you can't do that, it doesn't matter what you engineer.

I don't think these constraints will be met.

Re:Yeah, that's kinda what I mean...

[crunchygranola]

The only way something like this works is if there's a good source of Treatable water.

If you have to run it thru a desalination plant, that likely includes perchlorates, it's going to be even that much harder.

...

Water is found in the regolith ("soil") of Mars everywhere in significant quantities. You will have to strip mine it, but as mining operations go it is easy to get. From The microbial case for Mars and its implication for human expeditions to Mars, Gerda Horneck, Acta Astronautica 63 (2008) 1015 – 1024:

From the global neutron mapping of the Mars Odyssey mission, the present distribution of water in the shallow subsurface was divided in four types of regions: (i) regions with dry soil with a water content of about 2 wt%; (ii) northern permafrost regions with a high content of water ice (up to 53 wt% of water); (iii) southern permafrost regions with high content of water ice (>60 wt% of water) covered by a dry layer of regolith; and (iv) regions with water-rich soil at moderate latitudes (about 10 wt% of water).

So we get to decide how important the water content is when selecting a site to set up operations. At worst the content would be 2%, or 20 liters per tonne, but we may prefer those "moderate latitudes" with 100 liters per tonne. Extraction would involve simply heating the soil in a retort and condensing the escaped water. You will be digging up a lot of soil (especially in the 2% case) and discarding it as the water is extracted.

Preparing regolith for use as a cultivation medium will probably take a few steps, but removing the perchlorates will be the easiest of those steps. Simply use said water to extract them as perchlorates are highly water soluble. Hydroponics is all about circulating water through a growing medium, so extraction of all soluble compounds is inherently part of the operation. I suspect that some sort of granulating/pelletizing process would be used to get an appropriate porosity. Martian regolith is naturally high in phosphorus and potassium, and trace elements, so the only thing lacking is usable nitrogen. A Haber process system to make ammonia is the most likely way of getting that, and the ammonia could be dissolved directly in the water. A bit different from how hydroponics is done on Earth, which used an inert medium with all the nutrients in solution, but not that different.

Re:Totally confused

[crunchygranola]

You need to actually put in some effort to learn the subject, instead of just picking random factoids out of the aether (assuming that this is a serious post, and not just being disingenuous).

Mars gets only 40% of the solar energy that Earth gets, so to get Mars to the same temperature as Earth far more heat trapping is needed. Carbon dioxide on Earth traps heat as part of system that is 160 time thicker than Mars, including a lot of water vapor, which provides most of the trapping effect. Carbon dioxide is not warming Earth all by its lonesome. There is more water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, on average, than Mars has atmosphere, period. The atmosphere of Mars is bone dry.