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.

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.