Casula High iStem students watched on in excitement as a Space X rocket successfully blasted off on Tuesday with an experiment they designed onboard that could hold the key to humans travelling to, and living on, Mars.

Their experiment, dubbed ‘Algae in Microgravity’, is designed to determine how microgravity influences algae growth, the hypothesis being algae will hyper reproduce in microgravity due to the lack of gravity.

Last year, the experiment won the Powerhouse: Future Space Student Showcase, with the prize being an opportunity to have their experiment tested by scientists on the International Space Station (ISS).

If the scientists prove the students’ hypothesis, it could have substantial benefits for space travel, living on Mars and resolving serious earthly problems like climate change.

Casula High Year 11 iStem student, Marko Stojisavljevic, said algae already produced 20 to 30 per cent of the air we breathe, as well as photosynthesised organisms.

“The Earth became a green planet because algae was the first form of life to evolve here,” Marko said.

“It’s what’s allowed everything else to exist and created our atmosphere because it converted all the methane and carbon dioxide into oxygen, giving us an ozone layer and allowing everything to live.

“So, finding a way to reproduce algae faster, in the long term, we could also use it to turn Mars into a green planet.”

Casula High Maths/STEM teacher, Lexie Rouen, said, more immediately, algae could provide a way to “filter the air in the spacecraft, which means we could stay in those spacecrafts longer than we currently do now”.

For the launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the Casula students were joined by their iStem colleagues from Seven Hills High, who all cheered, clapped and counted down the seconds to blast off.

The spaceship will deliver two shoebox-sized containers carrying an ancient species of microalgae to the ISS scientists.

Ms Rouen said over the past year students from five other western Sydney schools had been working with the Casula team to overcome “design and engineering challenges”.

“The original idea had to get more refined in order to be able to get into space,” she said.

“We had to answer things like ‘what are the optimal growing conditions for a particular algae’, and ‘which algae do we actually want to send’?

“We also had engineering challenges like, ‘if we now send a liquid, which they’ve never done before, how do you manage a liquid in microgravity’, and ‘how are we going to measure what algae growth looks like?’

“When you’re sending a plant it’s really obvious as the plant grows, but when you’re sending a micro algae, it’s so small you can’t actually see it grow.”

The issues were all resolved before take-off and the Casula High team is now eagerly awaiting the experiment to start on the ISS.

“Once it’s up on the space station, it’ll take a couple of days to get started and then we will have immediate access to all of the data,” Ms Rouen said.

The students will compare and track all the data and changes with their control samples back on Earth.

As a prelude to the launch, NASA scientist and geologist Dr Adrian Brown, who is originally from Melbourne but is now working on the Mars rover mission, spoke with students about the mission and the rover’s journey to collect rock samples from the planet.

Dr Brown said the rover was looking for stromatolites on Mars - an ancient rock structure formed primarily in shallow pools by microbial mats of sticky, blue-green algae that served as evidence for dating the first lifeforms on Earth.

“If we’re able to find evidence of life on Mars, it’s going to be in the form of these microbial mats that have formed stromatolites in the rocks,” Dr Brown said.

“That’s what we’re keeping our keeping our eyes open for with the rover.

“We haven’t actually found any yet, but the hunt continues and as soon as we do it will be big news.”