NASA Is Offerring $1 Million To Turn CO2 Into Sugar (space.com) 174
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.
It would be better (Score:5, Funny)
To turn CO2 into beer. And pay $1 Billion.
Easy (Score:3)
To turn CO2 into beer. And pay $1 Billion.
Easy, plant some barley and hops, these will grow absorbing CO2 and then use these to make beer. Can I have my $1 billion please?
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To make Rum on Mars.
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Well this would get you most of the way there (Score:4)
Re:It would be better (Score:5, Funny)
I say potato, you say vodka.
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(yeah, I know it's a gas mix)
Plants & CO2 & sunlight (Score:5, Interesting)
Where do I claim my prize ?
Re:Plants & CO2 & sunlight (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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But it's not as if space is at a premium on Mars, though, is it? Far more useful than an efficient way of turning CO into glucose is an efficient way of turning CO into PE or polycarbonate. Once you can make the domes in situ, the rest is pretty darn easy.
I mean, sure, it's not quite as easy as that. You want to, at the same time, breed plants to operate at as high an altitude as possible and/or breed lichens to grow faster and/or prod
Re: Plants & CO2 & sunlight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Pressure, temperature, and atmosphere controlled space is.
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Interesting proposal. I'm weighing the specific gravity.
Re:Plants & CO2 & sunlight (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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)
You ignore the fact that the majority of any "sugar" crop is cellulose, a polymer of sugar. Since you want to jump to chemical processes right off the bat then add enzymes to cellulose pulp that converts it to sugar.
Re: Plants & CO2 & sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Especially something like potatoes. We can science the shit out of this.
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I see where you're going with this.
We can manufacture plastic, no ... make that biodegradable ... noses, ears, hands, lips, and stuff to make potato heads and sell it as, "Artificial Intelligence," with the disclaimer that, as with the current state of the technology, it's "For entertainment purposes, only."
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Plants & CO2 & sunlight
Sunlight is orange at daylight sometimes, but it doesn't have a Twitter account.
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I'm sure this is a valid approach, but I think they will want more detail. What plants? What kind of structure will you grow them in? Will they need soil, if so, how much? Can they grow in pure CO2 (and at what range of pressures)? If not, what other gases will they need? What additional nutrients will they need? Will you be able to recycle those nutrients from what's left of the plants after you extract the glucose? etc.?
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What protective strategies will fend off hackers who want to embed malicious worms and viruses?
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While parent is basically a throwaway, there's a grain of truth to it completely by accident.
If there was a reasonably accessible way to do this more efficiently, plants would use that instead of photosynthesis.
Doesn't mean there is no way to do it, but it's not likely going to be some obvious or simple process that nature could have managed on its own.
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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
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The clorophyll process is likely optimal as-is though.
Considering that a single electron is 'trigerring' or 'performing' it, yes.
they never developed any kind of electronics.
They did! But instead of transporting electrons, they transport protons.
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It's not like human legs are likely to evolve into wheels any time soon.
That would suck! Somehow I like kissing the legs of my GF.
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The competition states:
"The use of a bioreactor is not allowed as a component in the conversion of CO2 to products"
I would say that a greenhouse is a special case of "bioreactor."
Also note that bit about "efficient". Photosynthesis is at best 2% efficient, which assumes an optimal system and all products of the conversion counted. Any system producing glucose as the product is going to be a fraction of that.
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Also note that bit about "efficient". Photosynthesis is at best 2% efficient,
That is nonsense.
Photosynthesis is probabaly the most efficient process on the planet. A single electron triggered by a single photon is performing the proton transport to build up starch or sugar.
What do kids learn in our days in school?
Where does the Hydrogen come from? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Maybe from here [nasa.gov].
Course, knowing where it is is one thing. Knowing how to extract it efficiently is quite another.
Yeah, that's kinda what I mean... (Score:3)
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.
A rocky mountain stream might be easily usable; ice dissolved into rock formations, or even covered with mars soil, is another problem.
It's true that vacuum stills would work pretty well, so it's not impossible, just Almost impossible. :)
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Processing even very salty water on mars is not a significant problem. Just like on Earth, if you freeze water, almost pure H20 floats to the top where it can be collected. Perchlorates are merely a particuler form of salt.
Have you worked much with Perchlorates? (Score:2)
:)
They don't need Oxygen to burn, and work really well as rocket fuel, mixed with aluminum and epoxy.
Which almost everything we send up there is made of...
Re:Yeah, that's kinda what I mean... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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The target is Mars which has been determined to have enough subsurface water ice that were it lall iquid would cover Mars wit a global ocean 30 meters deep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Forward thinking is a must.
If our intent is to extract all the water and put on the surface, what, precisely, are the ramifications for the structure we removed the water from?
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Strip mine it or drill in areas where there'll be liquid subsurface water as is now suspected. Neither would have much of any impact at the levels any colonists would be capable of for decades. If future exploitation is deemed to have a deleterious impact there will be more than enough time to restrict methods in the future.
Why do you think that we need to go into minutia now?
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Why do you think that we need to go into minutia now?
well, duh.
It's right there in the Constitution:
A well regulated minutia ...
You're so unAmerican.
If you are not from America:
We should worry about the goddam details before we shit in our mess kit.
DON'T TREAD WATER ON MARS OR GIVE ME DEATH!
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Someone has been shitting in your mess kit if you think that the impact of water mining on mars would need to be excessively over detailed NOW.
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1800 California:
... water mining on mars would need to be excessively over detailed NOW ...
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What part of "There is enough subsurface water on Mars to submerge the entire planet 30 meters deep" don't you understand? Ah, you appear to be from SoCal. Never mind, clearly asking too much from you...
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1.) "Ah, you appear ..." Why are you making this personal? Are you reaching?
2.) "... asking too much from you ..." Same question.
What part of "Fuck, we're almost out of water." do you not get?
We did it here; we can do it there.
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Again, what part of "There is enough subsurface water on Mars to submerge the entire planet 30 meters deep" don't you understand? Given that you make useless comparisons with southern California, it's the MARS part.
That SoCa has overused it's fresh water supplies has absolutely nothing to do with Mars colonists being able to overuse theirs. Not everything is about you and your mistakes so your "lessons learned" are not applicable and thus your excessively over detailed impact planning is equally useless.
You
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Assuming say 10% efficiency how much energy and CO2/water would it take to provide a human adult's daily recommended sugar intake, I wonder.
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Sure by presumably they aren't expecting people to live off sugar alone.
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For every 6 CO2 molecules and Water molecules you put in, you get 1x glucose molecule, and 1x O2 molecule.
Glucose is C6-H12-O6... I'm pretty sure you'd get 6x O2 molecules, not 1x.
Balanced reaction... (Score:2)
That's the excess O2, left over after the other ones are used up.
That's a technical way to say this will liberate oxygen.
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You have to dig deep to find it, but according to the rules of the contest;
The source CO2 and hydrogen can be supplied from a commercially available pure gas (i.e., tanked CO2 and H2), or verifiably obtained from an alternate source (e.g., H2 from water electrolysis).
Pretty big "detail" to leave out of the press release, IMO.
Worth so much more than $1 million (Score:2)
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Yes one can use it to store energy but how exactly can the stored energy be extracted later? Fermentation to alcohol and then a combustion engine alternatively fuel cell is the only reasonable one I can come up with.
Just what we need... (Score:3)
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Don't plants already to this? (Score:3)
Pick a plant. They all convert light and CO2 to sugar. In terms of efficiency it depends on what is being measured. If it is the object's size vs their output over time, that it one way to look at efficiency. If it is a huge forest of maple trees, a field of sugar cane, or beet plants, they don't need much maintenance. Entire forests exist without any human effort, electricity, chemical additive, etc.
Anyway, the research seems kinda pointless after NASA just announced Terra-forming Mars won't be possible for many reasons. I will let NASA explain why...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-rel... [nasa.gov]
Mars just happens to look like an Earth desert in pictures. It doesn't mean it just needs oxygen and water and then go.
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Plants need water, generally speaking. And, generally speaking, there isn't much of that on Mars since, as you point out, it's largely desert-like.
So, some other method is going to be required for Martian use, and we can reasonably expect that it will not be so useful for terrestrial use because the conditions are so different.
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Plants need water, generally speaking. And, generally speaking, there isn't much of that on Mars since, as you point out, it's largely desert-like.
It doesn't matter if there isn't much on mars if you site your base near a lot of it. And we believe that we have located concentrated water, so that's a feasible goal.
I'm rich !!! Cuba is rich !!! (Score:2)
Sugar cane is the answer, or sugar beets, or wheat and corn and a bit of crushing and salavia.
Why not on earth? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
No! We must not have tech solutions. Instead, we must teach CO2 not to greenhouse [bostonglobe.com]!
Re: Why not on earth? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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The Martian (Score:2)
That was one of my main interrogations with The Martian: would growing potatoes be the best way to avoid starvation on Mars, or is there a way to bypass the potato phase?
Re: The Martian (Score:2)
On Mars, you'd build a Biosphere II in a cave system and have whatever you like grow there. Seed it with all kinds of plants and animals. With aroubd ten thousand square miles to play with, you've room.
No potato phase unless you count fish and chips.
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You are going to need to use sunlight to grow food. Some supplemental lighting might be needed (like keeping plants from dying during the dust storms) but photosynthesis is way too inefficient to use artificial lighting to produce food for humans.
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Humans need vitamin D. Full spectrum lighting isn't too bad and one quarter sunlight makes outside useless. That means your chief obstacle is energy. You'd need to build a fission or fusion generator. Fission we know how to do, fusion will require a lot of money thrown at it over a decade before we know if it's even doable. Either would give you the energy needed. You need the extra heat generated anyway as Mars is cold.
Oh, I see (Score:2)
Well then, I'll just go burn the blueprints to my SugaFyer9000.
I not sharing my retirement fund with some flag waving intern.
Not sure I trust them (Score:3)
They abandoned their CFD bugfix challenge because too many applied. That doesn't give me confidence in their crowdsourcing ability.
The ideal solution. (Score:2)
Obviously plants and blue-green algae turn co2 into sugar. Just not very quickly.
We can extract, modify and synthesize DNA, so we can modify cyanobacteria to be faster, more efficient, rapidly multiplying sugar producers.
Then it's just a matter of not reading A For Andromeda.
Beets (Score:2)
Up here in the midwest, beets grow well.
Of course NASA might ne able to grow sugar cane om its properies in Forida
Sweet ... (Score:2)
... dreams are made of these CO2.
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... dreams are made of these CO2.
Who has a mind to disagree?
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We get water from the seven seas.
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Some of them want to use you ...
Forget Mars, we need this for climate change (Score:2)
This would be a impotent step in solving our climate change issues from excess CO2. If we were able to convert the excess CO2 in our air to sugar it would help to remove it and provide a fuel that our civilization could use.
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Can't be done (Score:2)
The Gibbs free energy [wikipedia.org] defines the energy state of a molecule. Think of it as the potential eneregy of a molecule on a ladder. The higher the Gibbs free energy of a molecule, the more potential energy it has, so the more energy you can extract from it in chemical reactions. On the other hand, if it's low, then you actually have to put energy into it to change its chemical formulation.
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Re:Forget Mars (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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There's cost implications too. On earth it might not be the cheapest way to farm sugar, even if it is more efficient. Sugar beet, cane etc grow just fine for example. On Mars it would be essential to do it as a chemical process as the crops won't grow there.
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Could be dependent on factors different on Mars like ubiquitous perchlorates just lying around in bulk.
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Shit.
That does make sense.
It's kind like the parallel argument, "To prevent more handgun violence, we need more handguns," when in fact it's, "The gun industry wants to broaden its consumer base."
Well done.
Re:Grow sugar cane? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I do also question why the GP thinks animals produce milk as well.
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Yes, meat and milk and any other goddam source that supports survival.
Crap, humans even eat snails **shudder**.
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Before shuddering I really suggest you give it a try. A lovely garlic and butter escagot is a beautiful starter for any meal.
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I saw it on a menu once ... ONCE!
The restaurant was not full service.
No barf bags.
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Why would you barf? It has a flavour mixed between seafood and beef with a strong taste of garlic, and a texture tougher than fish. I've put a lot of things in my mouth, some of them truly horrid (deep fried bat nearly made me barf) and this is IMO one of the more plainer westernish foods out there in terms of flavour and texture.
You should take a trip to France, you'll see it on the menu every time you read the menu (and TBH it's a shitload better than a lot of French food).
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I would barf for the same reason I get air/sea sick.
Not exactly, but maybe.
Who knows?
Certainly not me because I ain't gonna try that shit.
Let Mikey try it. He'll eat anything.
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If you are going to eat meat, you should know ...
how to chew.
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Brown sugar IS cane sugar you idiot.
basically yes (Score:3)
basically yes, that's the plan.
this NASA project is about "sciencing the shit out of" all the tiny details that go behind the general word "tree":
- how to deal growinv something in a soil that is mostly perchlorate (not exactly a rich soil)?
- how to deal with an atmospheric pressure that is a tiny fraction of earth's?
- how to deal with sun's output which is a lot less (in terms of useful light) but higher (in term of radiations)
- and which exact plant are you going to use as "tree" ? (probably some cyanobac
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Geo-engineering Mars to support earth type life requires that long term priorities to be defined clearly.
It seems to me that glucose production from Martian raw materials is critical for the sustainability of human life; that a long term priority is already presumed by NASA in this exercise. We are not geo-engineering by altering the environment but rather by containing an environment.
That means the primary engineering a technological solution which leads into the questions you ask.
- how to deal growinv something in a soil that is mostly perchlorate (not exactly a rich soil)?
Soil minerals obviously
Re: Totally confused (Score:2, Informative)
(1) Mars atmosphere is thinner, meaning it cannot retain as much heat as Earth
(2) Mars is farther away from the Sun
Re: Totally confused (Score:2)
With respect to 2, if you double the distance from the source then you quarter the energy you get from it.
So if Mars is twice as far from the sun, it gets a quarter the solar radiation.
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I'll assume these are serious questions.
No, you have not been told the sun isn't the cause. What you have been told is that variation in solar output is not the cause.
CO2 is like a blanket, but blankets do nothing without a source of heat. You need a source of heat before CO2 can trap it. That source is the sun.
Mars has a very thin atmosphere. As a result, it's not going to trap anything. It's the density that matters, not the percentage. Think of silver foil. It's reflective. If you cover the floor of a r
Re:Totally confused (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I can do it REAL cheap. Just takes a LOT of time...
Please send the check to...
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