NASA’s CO2 Conversion Challenge down to three teams competing for grand prize

In Texas, NASA’s CO2 Conversion Challenge invited the public to come up with ways to convert this principle component of the Martian atmosphere into sugar, which astronauts could use to make useful products – anything from plastics, adhesives, and fuels to food and medicine.

Now, three teams of solvers have demonstrated prototype systems capable of converting CO2 from the air into glucose and other useful sugars. Teams Air Company of Brooklyn, New York; Hago Energetics Inc. of Thousand Oaks, California; and SSwEET from the University of California, Berkeley will take home equal shares of the $650,000 base prize.