Two students fed a Mars crew with 1,000-year-old Hawaiian farming wisdom — and NASA paid attention

Leilani Jensen and Raven Kromer, two seniors at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, beat more than 100 final teams — including corporate research groups — in NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge. Their winning design, ʻOhā Kanu, adapts the ancient Hawaiian ahupuaʻa system, which manages land from mountain to sea as one living whole, into a zero-waste Mars farm mixing hydroponics, aquaculture, field crops and orchards. It won one of five national awards, worth $50,000. 'Ancient Hawaiians were the first space explorers,' Kromer joked — and their design philosophy was resilience over maximum yield: always food on the table, no matter what happens.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation