He spends his days battling kudzu, an invasive plant that has overrun millions of acres of land throughout the Southeastern United States. For his sixth grade science project, Schindler — now 17 years old — came up with the idea of planting kudzu on Mars.
“We breathe in oxygen, we breathe out CO2, and plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen. I started asking what would make it impossible to grow kudzu on Mars,” he said.
Experimenting with different gasses led him to find that helium killed the kudzu but without harming the other plants around it.