What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?

LET´S ACT

Summary

To achieve a desired future it is necessary to change some things, such as: pollution caused by excess CO2. The objective of the work is to be able to observe from which places carbon is emitted within a particular locality. In order to solve this, we propose to generate a device that helps us locate the points where a large carbon emission is generated in a locality. The device would be a meteorological type balloon which has a GPS and a carbon emission detector, then a drone will follow the route that the balloon made to determine the exact point where the carbon is emitted. Finally these points will be notified.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The challenge we chose as a team was "what is our carbon footprint?" The challenge, to sum it up, asks us to try to create a device or a method that provides a record of the main sources of carbon emissions, what activities generate more carbon dioxide, give an approximate value of the amount of carbon dioxide that is recorded in a city, in a town, in a town, country, region, and so on. These data collected by our project would be communicated to government agencies, environmental companies, and also to the public knowledge.

 Once all this has been communicated, it will be up to the government or responsible companies to take care of and respect the environment in that locality. One of the advantages of this project is that it would allow a more in-depth study of carbon sources, another advantage is working with true data, since many times the data is modified in exchange for money or for various reasons. From all of us we would try to make ourselves heard through the people, since our information would be public knowledge. Looking at it from another point of view, it is something that must be acted on now, because with every minute that passes pollution grows by leaps and bounds, causing, for example, pollution, the greenhouse effect, and many other consequences that are not good at all. for the future of humanity. About our project ... what is it? how does it work? what does? Well, (phase 1) our idea is to place ourselves over a particular city, releasing a balloon filled with helium, due to its low reaction with the environment, it would not pollute it, and in its lower part it would carry a sensor that would give a general screenshot of the amount of carbon dioxide that is in that city through sensors that capture the presence of carbon dioxide in the air and would also carry a locator or GPS to see the area covered by its route. All this to analyze if the carbon dioxide levels are sufficient to go to phase 2. Phase 2 consists of flying over UAV that would fly for a time of approximately 6 hours and at high speed (249 km / hour) trying to map almost the entire area by over which the globe passed to locate exactly the main source of carbon emission through sensors and GPS, once that great source of carbon emission is found, it is communicated to government entities and a way is sought to help change that carbon dioxide production. Then in phase 3 after a while a control is made to see if changes were made or not in carbon pollution through another balloon that is released to the sky, if the changes are not favorable, the whole procedure is done again back until results are found. Satellites are used to communicate the control towers or the place where the information would be sent and everything would be in real time, the NASA carbon dioxide observing satellite could be used. And we hope to achieve a change at the global level in terms of CO2 pollution, since enough importance is not being given to this issue, which has a very large magnitude and can trigger very big things.


How We Developed This Project

What inspired us to work on this project was the pollution that is generated from carbon, it is something impressive and definitely bad, but it is rare that someone sees it with the magnitude that it demands, this is caused by factories, cars, fires, and by many other influencing factors: economic, religious, etcetera. So the greatest inspiration and our main focus or objective of working on this project is to be able to open people's eyes and help improve these conditions. The coding language we used was C ++, as was the software, and the hardware we used was Arduino MEGA. We had many problems since none of the members of the group is an expert on the subject, but through the help of organizers, judges and our imagination we were able to overcome it. At the beginning, we chose the fire challenge, but we saw that the idea we had did not adapt to that environment, but it did adapt to the environment of this challenge, and with other tweaks we were able to improve the project and make it final. And we achieved a very fun and good atmosphere among colleagues.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We use NASA's carbon dioxide observatory, we also use pages like aqua and climate, they helped us a lot. We were also inspired and amazed by the professional way of working that is used.

Project Demo

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16jm2kXElAtQfPuPPQF6SKh_XNwlAu-F1/view?usp=sharing

Data & Resources

https://climate.nasa.gov/

https://aqua.nasa.gov/

https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/

Tags
#let´sgo#impact#team
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.