NASA will host a virtual awards ceremony at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 24, to announce winners of the CO2 Conversion Challenge – a competition to convert carbon dioxide, or CO2, into glucose and other useful sugars. Winning teams will take home a share of the $750,000 prize.
Media and the public are invited to watch the event on YouTube.
Speakers include:
- Gavin Schmidt, NASA senior climate advisor and director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
- Eugene Tu, center director at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley
- John Hogan, chief of the Bioengineering Branch at NASA Ames
- Morgan Abney, NASA Engineering and Safety Center technical fellow for Environmental Control and Life Support Systems at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama
- Representatives from the winning teams
Following the awards ceremony, at 3 p.m., NASA will host a Reddit Ask Me Anything with challenge winners and NASA experts.
In Phase 2 of the challenge, teams demonstrated non-biological systems for turning CO2 into sugars, which could be used to feed microorganisms commonly used in biomanufacturing systems. Phase 1 focused on design concepts and awarded a total of $250,000 to five top-scoring teams in May 2019.
The $1 million prize competition aims to help advance the emerging biomanufacturing field, which could help future explorers make food, medicine, fuels, and other materials while living and working far from Earth. These technologies could also help revolutionize sustainable manufacturing on Earth, as they allow an extensive range of products to be made from recaptured CO2 in the atmosphere and reduce industrial emissions.
Centennial Challenges, part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, offers incentive prizes to generate revolutionary research and technology solutions to problems of interest to NASA and the nation. Centennial Challenges is managed at NASA Marshall.
For more information on NASA’s Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program, go to:
