An opportunity out of this world has been presented to a 25-year-old university student in Canberra.
Shingo Nishimoto, an aerospace engineering student at the Australian National University, has won the chance to experiment on the International Space Station.
"This is really exciting," he told The Canberra Times.
Using two chopsticks bound together with a rubber band, Mr Nishimoto aims to further our understanding of astrodynamics.
He said observing the chopsticks' movement over a long period of time in microgravity (weightlessness) could help predict and control movement of equipment in space.
"That experiment will help us to understand whether the theoretical expectation is correct, and I believe that the theory can apply to the space robots that manage the angular momentum vector to the robots' body frame using shape deformation," Mr Nishimoto said.
He entered his experiment in the Asian Try-Zero G competition where it was selected by a panel of experts.
The competition was delivered in Australia by One Giant Leap Australian Foundation with sponsorship from the Australian Space Agency. It welcomed young scientists and engineers and was free to enter.
While Mr Nishimoto won't be doing the experiment himself, he will prepare it for astronauts from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to conduct it on his behalf. They will conduct the experiment on the Kibo module on the space station.
The astrodynamics student picked chopsticks and a rubber band because it's easy to get those materials to the space station. He was deeply grateful for the selection of his simple experiment and hoped it would draw more students to STEM studies and aerospace engineering.
Mr Nishimoto had studied mechanical engineering in Japan and then moved to the aerospace sphere to challenge himself.
"Space is just cool and more sophisticated," he said.
The demonstration of his experiment will be broadcast live and relayed to the ground station at Tsukuba Space Center, in Japan.
Deputy head of the Australian Space Agency Dara Williams said such "exceptional space talent" would help grow industries, from advanced manufacturing to AI and robotics.
