25 year old Nigerian-American, Chinyere “Chichi” Ukeje, a Hopkins engineering student recently won $300,000 for finishing first place in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge with an idea for astronaut food that can, in part, be developed indoors with sustainable components. Ukeje’s project was chosen to win the $300,000 top prize out of 113 competitors from 28 states and 33 countries.
Her winning entry outlines how astronauts could take cubes of nutritious food and warm them in portable electric lunch boxes for familiar meals such as tacos and pasta, as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer. “The problem of feeding astronauts on Mars is more than just growing crops,” Ukeje told the outlet. “You want them to feel at home when they are millions of miles from home.”
Innovation Details
According to NASA, her innovative food system provides “a system that cooks fresh meals daily and has provisions to work through shortages of power, water, equipment or crew time.” It combines “controlled-environment agriculture, fermentation and fungi cultivation, and closed-loop nutrient recycling through bioreactors with limited Earth-provisioned foods to produce 50% of the food away from Earth.”
The global competition challenged participants to develop a complete nutritional and self-sustaining plan to feed a 15-person crew for roughly 513 Earth days, or 500 Martian sols, on the planet’s surface.
The food system, Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure, or ANI, is named after the Nigerian Earth goddess of harvest and fertility and the fertile ground from which all life grows, a nod to her family’s Igbo roots.
Ukeje credits her degree with providing insights into how to solve the problem: “I approached the challenge through the lens of computer science—looking at how these standalone food production technologies could be connected, how their data could be synthesized, and how that information could help the crew make the decisions they need to survive.”
