Challenge:

Hg Project chose the Smash your SDGs! challenge and focused on creating a solution using data provided by NASA and other satellites to solve problems that will help to maintain the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Our team is focusing on the third and twelfth goals, which are “good health and well-being” and “responsible consumption and production”.

Problem/Background:

The ocean has always been one of the most important food sources for the survival of the human species. The sea is home to an exaggerated quantity of food filled with essential nutrients that are needed to accomplish a balanced diet. However, despite being an extremely important variable for the existence of life on the planet, throughout the years we have constantly polluting our oceans with harmful substances like heavy metals affecting us and the environment.

Lately we have been warned by recent studies that mercury, in the organic form of methylmercury, has been found in seafood. There's a phenomenon called bioaccumulation and it's the result of significant quantities of mercury inside the fish. This is one of the results of the action of throwing anthropogenic wastes into the ocean, that may contain traces of heavy metals like mercury. These heavy metals go into the food web by getting into the smaller and lower levels, which is the case of the zooplankton. As the web continues on, the traces of mercury found in the organism will increase. This process is known as bioaugmentation. The consumption of these organisms that contain methylmercury, results dangerous for human health on the long term, and may result more dangerous to pregnant women and their child.

“The consumption of contaminated seafood is the main source of people's exposure to mercury” This was mentioned by Carl Lamborg, oceanographer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Due to the great importance that these animals have in our lifestyle, the creation of this project was considered substantial, and in the case of being implemented in real life, it would help avoid future cases of mercury intoxication caused by the consumption of fish.

Solution:

Create a mapping system of the fishing areas in a certain region, in this case we chose the Gulf of California. With the information displayed by the mapping system, design a tracking software that will display the process which the fish has been through. Furthermore, the use of a method that will determine the mercury concentration in the fish and lastly, the implementation of a chelation method (in case the fish resulted with harmful levels of methylmercury) which will turn methylmercury into a stable component, stopping the oxidation it would’ve caused in the body.

Built with:

For the development of our solution, we created an interface in python code. We had to install additional libraries to use specific functions such as: tkinter and qrcode, as well as pillow.

We used Python as our language of preference because of the variety and effectiveness of the libraries, and we made use of cell phones and multiple laptops as hardware and testing for de code.

How does our solution work?:

The whole production line starts with the fish (either tuna, shark or sardine) passing through the conveyor line. At an specific point, there will be an infrared sensor that will be triggered when the fish passes at the point where this sensor’s signal operates. When this sensor is triggered, a fixed RAMAN laser will be emitted on the fish to be analyzed, the given result would be a raw spectroscopy that will be filtered down the frequency of the component to be analyzed, which is the methyl-mercury. Once we have narrowed down the whole scheme to just the componente we want, the peaks of those frequencies will establish a level of methylmercury concentration.

To determine if the chelation process will be done or not for each fish, we have to work around an essential parameter, which is the ideal concentration of mercury within the fish so that when it is consumed it will not cause any long-term disease or intoxication. This initial parameter is 0.15 micrograms per grams of fish (flesh), and when the spectroscopy is done, if there’s any peaks over the “ideal concentration”, the “contaminated” fish will be passed on to a different conveyor line, where the chelation process will be done. All of these different concentrations will be passed on to a data acquisition card, where with a program, there’s gonna be the conveyor line shift, as seen in the following diagram.

Future Plans

We will try to develop improvements in our project by seeking advice from experts in chemistry, physics and engineers. We also plan on working with our project in the future even after the Space Apps Challenge, because we believe we could help our community with these solution we have developed.

Resources:

-To find a part of our solution we took inspiration from methods that several NASA programs have used to detect specific substances in an environment. For example, we found a method called Portable Remote Imaging Spectrometer (PRISM) that allows scientists detect different components based in their spectral signals and therefore they can use this as indicators of water quality. Likewise, NASA programs like Mars 2020 will use a system called SHERLOC in which through spectroscopic techniques like RAMAN scattering they will try to detect the presence of biosignatures and other substances in the Martian surface.

- https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search?m=0.9146892686593588!-36.140625!2!1!0!0%2C2&fst0=Oceans&fsm0=Ocean%20Chemistry

- Python coding .

- Google Maps

- Google Earth which is linked to NASA satellites

- Autocad for production line design

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