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Intro: why we do it!
Hello everybody, we are Team Tunnel Gott Erkenner, German for Tunnel God Detector and we tackled the “When Landslides Strike” challenge during NASA Space Apps Challange 2017.
Our house in Stuttgart shakes regularly because of a tunnel construction site nearby with targeted detonations. This and other movements like landslides, earthquakes or avalanches should be detected and located. In this way Emergency teams can respond faster. Furthermore the negative impact on humans and environment caused by vibrations and noise is documented.
We used cheap accelerometers synchronised with GPS. Many of them combined can detect and locate the magnitude and origin of tremors. On the very left and very right of the command prompt you see in the demo in the video, you can see here two sensors and in the middle a time synchronising ping every second. Last night we already detected two targeted detonations on the construction site next to our location.
Listen to the sound of our tremors…Satellites in space cannot look underneath the surface, but combined with our detectors, we can achieve that. Let’s do that!
Contact the team: tunnelgott(at)aerospaceresearch.net
Solving the problem: Why the strange (german) name?
The reasons we worked on this topic are deeply personal. Several members of the team experienced earth movements already.
- local detonations of Stuttgart21 tunnel dig project, shackspace members feel each day.
- the Skopje, Macedonia earth quake in 2016 one of our teammates experienced
- Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly Goal 1.5 and Goal 13.1
Next to shackspace, the location of SpaceApps Stuttgart event, is the construction site for the Stuttgart21 (S21) project. A federal, regional and local improvement project of the train infrastructure. There are several detonations each day to drive the tunnel further underneath Stuttgart and we hve shaking windows and floors for about 2 years now. This is annoying, but not dangerous. And as a meme for not knowing when these tremors come and where they are digging now, shackspace members start comparing it to a mystical, ancient god living underneath us demanding sacrifices by making the earth shake. This deity was just called Tunnel Gott, which means Tunnel God in German, and mostly everytime the house is shaking, someone is saying that Tunnel God speaks to us. So this meme became our fitting project name.
But besides this amusing sounding story, one of our teammates experienced the Skopje Earthquake in 2016 with mb5.2 strength and more than 100 people have been injured and sought medical assistance. She explained that in 1963, a Mw6.1 earthquake hit Skopje destroying about 80% of the city and many dead people. So people still think of this shocking event when other earth quakes hit. Every minute saved in that you have data about the quake makes emergency teams faster and saving people.
Combined, these two facts lead us to tackle the challenge to help people by providing this data faster. We also included related effects like landslides and avalanches because we decovered these as most likely effected by the climate change and causing possible threats to everyone living in mountainous areas, no matter if in the developed or developing countries. So, our working group chose the "When Lands Strike" challenge and we came up with the following mission statement.
Mission Statement
Saving people in danger by supporting emergency respond teams by tracking seismic activity and calculate origin of bursts faster. For that, cheap and open-source distributed sensors on ground in collaboration with satellites (space segment) and in combination with existing data in data-bases shall be used, that everyone can build or obtain easily and join creating the essential data.
Components: You can build your own sensor hardware < 50€
To bring the Tunnel-God-Detector to each corner of this world,...
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x3n0x
John Costik
Samuel Wantman
andrew.david.thaler