PHILADELPHIA — A Philadelphia entrant has won the top $300,000 prize in a NASA competition to design a system that could feed astronauts living on Mars.
NASA named Chinyere Ukeje the first-place winner of the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table on Thursday. The agency split $650,000 among five U.S. winners, according to its announcement, leaving $100,000 of its advertised purse unspent.
The contest targets a basic obstacle to crewed Mars missions: food. Astronaut meals are almost entirely cooked and packaged on Earth, and NASA said that approach won’t be sustainable when a one-way trip to Mars takes at least nine months.
Ukeje’s winning concept, Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure, or ANI, combines indoor crop growing, fermentation, fungi cultivation, and nutrient-recycling bioreactors to produce half the crew’s food away from Earth, NASA said. The other half would come from Earth, as much as the contest rules allowed.
The system would cook fresh meals daily and keep running through shortages of power, water, equipment, or crew time, NASA said. Its name comes from Ani, the Nigerian Earth goddess of harvest and fertility.
Ukeje was the only U.S. prize winner NASA listed as an individual rather than a company or team.
Third place went unawarded
NASA offered up to $750,000 when the contest opened in January. The published prize structure included up to $100,000 for third place, but NASA named no third-place winner and did not say why.
NASA said second place and $200,000 went to Cislune of Rosemead, Calif., for a system that pairs computer-selected crops with fermented foods and a reserve of Earth-supplied food.
Three $50,000 category awards went to Ohā Kanu of Hilo, Hawaii; Orbital Health Systems Inc. of Evansville, Ind.; and Autonomic Resilience Collective of Bentonville, Ark.
Belgium’s Astrofood won the international award but received no money. Under the rules, international teams were ineligible for NASA prizes.
15 astronauts, 500 days
NASA judged 113 submissions from 33 countries and 28 U.S. states—entrants designed for a 15-person crew living on Mars for 500 sols, or about 513 Earth days.
Each had to submit a two-week meal plan, a habitat layout, and a working computer simulation that judges used to test designs against power shortages and other strains, according to the Methuselah Foundation’s Deep Space Food Consortium, which administers the contest.
“The criteria we laid out for this competition were challenging, but intentionally so,” said head judge Alexander Meyers, who supports NASA Centennial Challenges through Noetic Strategies at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Designs, not hardware
Mars to Table judged plans rather than working equipment, and NASA did not say whether it will develop any winning concept further.
That sets it apart from the original Deep Space Food Challenge, which NASA ran with the Canadian Space Agency from 2021 to 2024. Teams in that contest built and tested full-scale systems, and Interstellar Lab won the $750,000 grand prize in August 2024.
