NASA challenges public to find ways of surviving on Mars

NASA has announced a CO2 Conversion Challenge to take some assistance from the public on how its astronauts can endure on the Red Planet.

Mars has plenty of CO2 and to leverage the planet's natural resource to make it useful for the astronauts is what the agency is looking at. The challenge is for the public to find ways to turn carbon dioxide into compounds which would be useful on Mars, Engadget reported.

The challenge will focus on glucose and the first phase will require teams to submit their design explaining their approach. Five teams could win USD 50,000 each. The second phase of the challenge will require the selected teams to build and demonstrate their solutions. Winning candidate from the group could win up to USD 750,000.

The registrations are open and participants can submit their entries until February 28, 2019. The winners are likely to be announced by April.