A Philly woman won a NASA contest to design a food system for astronauts on Mars
Chunyere “Chichi” Ukeje, 25, will receive $300,000 for first place in the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table competition.
A 25-year-old Philadelphia woman won the $300,000 first prize in a NASA competition to design food systems to improve how astronauts eat in space, and eventually how they will eat on Mars, the space agency announced Thursday.
Chinyere “Chichi” Ukeje, a native of Bowie, Md., now living with her husband in Northeast Philadelphia, submitted a proposal called Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure, or ANI, which is named after the Nigerian Earth goddess of harvest and fertility.
Ukeje said in a phone interview Friday night that her family has roots in Nigeria and with the Igbo people, a major ethnic group in that country.
With the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table competition, NASA asked participants to “explore innovative solutions for integrated space food systems that would provide safe, nutritious meals to astronauts living and working in space,” the agency said.
NASA launched Mars to Table in January 2026 as a follow to the Deep Space Food Challenge, which NASA ran from 2014 to 2021 in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency.
The updated competition included entries from teams in 28 U.S. states and from a total of 33 countries. The total prize pool was $650,000 for five winning teams.
Jennifer Edmunson, program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said in a statement: “The future of human space exploration will rely on innovative food systems, and it is amazing how much ingenuity this challenge has helped us identify from participants near and far.”
The challenge was created to find ways to feed astronauts without having to send prepackaged foods, which would not be possible because of the sheer bulk for the many months a Mars mission would take.
The core of the challenge was to create a working system for a 15-person astronaut crew for 500 Martian sols, which is the equivalent of around 513 Earth days.
“The problem of feeding astronauts on Mars is more than just growing crops,” said Ukeje, who is currently studying for a master’s degree in computer science at Johns Hopkins University.
After spending most of her childhood in Maryland, Ukeje went to Nigeria during high school. She then returned to the U.S. to earn her bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, before moving to Philadelphia.
NASA described Ukeje’s “ANI” as “a modular food ecosystem combining 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.”
Ukeje’s complex winning entry included having astronauts heating food with portable electric lunch boxes. The astronauts would take cubes of nutritious food and prepare them into recognizable meals, and then they could have “taco night” or “Italian pasta night.”
“You want them to feel at home when they are millions of miles from home,” she said.
She was surprised she won first place, but not surprised that she did well.
“I completely poured myself into this project,” she said.
There are no restrictions on what she can spend her prize money on, but Ukeje said she expects some of it will go into further food technology research.
