A 25-year-old graduate student from Philadelphia has won the $300,000 first prize in a NASA competition to design how astronauts will eat on long missions to Mars. Chunyere “Chichi” Ukeje took the top award in the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table, the space agency announced.
Ukeje is a native of Bowie, Maryland, and now lives in Northeast Philadelphia with her husband. She is currently studying for a master’s degree in computer science at Johns Hopkins University. Her entry beat the rest of the field in a global competition that NASA launched in January 2026.
Mars to Table follows the earlier Deep Space Food Challenge, which NASA ran from 2014 to 2021 in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency. Earlier efforts focused on individual food production technologies. This round asked participants to design a complete, integrated system, one capable of feeding a 15-person crew for 500 Martian sols, roughly 513 Earth days.
The reason is practical. A Mars mission would take many months, and sending prepackaged food for the whole journey would mean enormous bulk. NASA wanted ideas that reduce that dependence while keeping astronauts healthy and their meals varied enough to protect morale.
Ukeje’s system is called ANI. It is designed to produce 50% of a crew’s food away from Earth and uses bioreactors for closed-loop nutrient recycling. Reports also describe a setup in which astronauts take cubes of nutritious food and prepare them in portable electric lunch boxes. The system is named after the Nigerian Earth goddess of harvest and fertility, a nod to the resilience she wanted the design to carry.
Her central argument was that growing crops is only part of the problem. “The problem of feeding astronauts on Mars is more than just growing crops,” she said.
NASA announced five winning teams. Reports put the combined prize money at $650,000, though the challenge was originally announced with up to $750,000 available. The second-place prize of $200,000 went to Cislune, a team from Rosemead, California. Teams from Hawaii, Indiana and Arkansas each received $50,000 for their specific contributions.
A prize-winning design is not a flight-ready food system, and humans are still years away from walking on Mars. But competitions like this one are how space agencies draw ideas from outside traditional aerospace, and this year’s top award went to a 25-year-old still in graduate school. NASA has also said such work could improve food security on Earth, which is where the lessons may be felt first.
