NASA is offering $ 1 million to turn carbon dioxide into sugar and other compounds.

Seeking to turn planet Mars carbon into useful compounds like sugar, NASA offers up to $ 1 million to anyone who can solve the problem.

The riddle is that spaceships going to the planet – or any other, from somewhere else – will have limited space to bring in equipment and materials to create sugar from the carbon dioxide, which is very abundant on Mars.

An employee poses with a pipe used to transport liquid CO2 on 8 September 2008 at the "Schwarze Pumpe" ("Black Pump") power plant of the largest European energy company Vattenfall in Werder, near Berlin. (Photo credit MICHAEL URBAN / AFP / Getty Images)

Why sugar?

Because carbon and oxygen combine to give you sugar – and sugar glucose is the easiest to metabolize, for example, for dairy bioreactors, and therefore the most effective.

"Enabling a sustained human life on another planet will require a lot of resources and we can not bring everything we need.We must be creative," said Monsi Roman, head of NASA's Centennial Challenges program. . "If we can transform an existing and abundant resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products, space and ground applications are endless."

"We are asking the public to help us convert carbon dioxide into sugar and the end of the game is very concrete," Roman told ABC News. "This conversion occurs naturally in photosynthesis on Earth all the time, it's a problem on Mars, there's a lot of carbon dioxide, if we have hydrogen, we can basically do designer farms."

The NASA logo is posted on the agency's booth at CES 2018 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 11, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

For someone – or a team of people – to claim the total amount of one million dollars from NASA, there are two phases to go through. The first part is a "conceptual phase", in which the details of the physico-chemical approach of the conversion of CO2 into glucose will have to be explained in detail. During this phase, prizes for up to 5 teams will be divided into one team that could capture all five). The demonstration phase, where the thing must really work, goes along with a price of $ 750,000.

Interested parties must register by January 24, 2019 and submit their proposals by February 28, 2019.

Here is your chance to collect a jackpot of money and do the story at the same time.

What are you waiting for?