Kannur, Kerala, April 30, 2022: HeroX, a leading platform and open marketplace for crowdsourced solutions, recently announced the winners of the crowdsourcing competition, “Waste to Base Materials Challenge: Sustainable Reprocessing in Space“. Future human missions to Mars and the journey back to Earth are expected to take two to three years. During this time, significant amounts of waste will be generated. HeroX was seeking innovative approaches to repurpose, recycle, and reprocess the waste generated on board to enable mission sustainability with its open innovation challenge.
NASA’s Waste to Base Materials Challenge asked the larger community to provide inventive approaches to waste management and conversion in four specific categories:
- Trash
- Fecal waste
- Foam packaging material
- Carbon dioxide processing
Team collab consisting of Aadhithya & Dr.Mitul Sarkar won 2 awards in the trash & foam packaging material categories.
Aadhithya is an innovator from India who loves solving innovation challenges, in this process by cross-pollination of knowledge across industries he has won 50+ global innovation challenges in the last 10 years.
Dr.Mitul Sarkar based in the U.S.A is an ‘alchemist’ for transformational ideas & innovation. He has leveraged his experience, knowledge, and foresight at the intersections of health, education, technology, and business, along with his interests in marketing, storytelling, and futuring.
Competing against teams from around the world, the team collab proposed two solutions, one that should cut down foam packaging used extensively for protecting equipment during launch, which after launch usually ends up as waste, the new solution will provide radiation shielding, save space & provide 100’s of liters of extra water critical for longer space missions and the second solution will help extract even a drop of water leftover in a straw or water pouches or other waste generated in space.
Aadhithya is also the founder of an innovation listing portal called Givemechallenge.com, which helps people around the world to find such innovation opportunities.