Universal Bio Mining is a biotechnology company that manipulates organisms to improve and reduce the environmental impact of copper and gold mining.
UBM had a contract with NASA through the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program to advance the development of biological in situ resource utilization for NASA’s space exploration programs. The proposal was to build a foundation to use synthetic biology to engineer microorganisms to extract metals from naturally occurring extraterrestrial regolith. Regolith is a layer of loose deposits covering solid rock, that includes dust, soil and broken rock present on Earth, the Moon, Mars and some asteroids.