NEWS Space Technology
NASA Awards $650,000 to Mars Food System Designs, With $300,000 Top Prize for Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure
The top $300,000 prize went to Chinyere Ukeje of Philadelphia for the Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure (ANI), a modular ecosystem of agriculture, fermentation, fungi cultivation and closed-loop nutrient recycling designed to produce half a crew's food away from Earth. Here is why feeding a Mars crew is one of the harder engineering problems, and what the five winners actually delivered.