NASA names winners of $650,000 Deep Space Food Challenge for Mars missions
NASA has awarded $650,000 to the winners of its Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table, with the top $300,000 prize going to Chinyere Ukeje of Philadelphia for a modular food ecosystem named ANI.
NASA has announced the winners of the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table, awarding $650,000 across 113 submissions from teams in 33 countries and 28 US states.
The top $300,000 prize went to Chinyere Ukeje of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for “Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure (ANI)” — a modular food ecosystem combining controlled-environment agriculture, fermentation and fungi cultivation, and closed-loop nutrient recycling through bioreactors to produce 50% of food away from Earth. Named after the Nigerian Earth goddess of harvest and fertility, ANI cooks fresh meals daily and works through shortages of power, water, equipment or crew time.
Second place ($200,000) went to Cislune of Rosemead, California, for “Fresh, Ferment, Reserve”. The three $50,000 awards went to Ohā Kanu of Hilo, Hawaii, Orbital Health Systems of Evansville, Indiana, and the Autonomic Resilience Collective of Bentonville, Arkansas. Astrofood of Ellezelles, Belgium, was named international winner with “Food Resilience Ecosystem for Space Habitats (FRESH)”.
The challenge, launched in January 2026 as a follow-on to the Deep Space Food Challenge run with the Canadian Space Agency, tasked teams with feeding a 15-person crew across 500 Martian sols — about 513 Earth days — as pre-packaged meals are not sustainable for Mars missions.
“We’re thrilled to keep advancing the future of space food systems with this challenge,” said Jennifer Edmunson, program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
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