Lighting and illumination investigation of long-term residence on Mars for the case of a set of designed Martian Habitat Units (MHUs)

Addressing the subject matter of human missions on Mars, the Martian Habitat Units (MHUs) are presented as a comprehensive solution. MHUs are designed in clusters of 10 units, each capable of serving as long-term habitats for 9 scientific crew members. The life-style requirements of the units are targeted at an imitation of cultural thriving life we all know of, and not a mere survival-type shelter expecting the first people to step foot on Mars. One aspect of many challenging issues to be addressed in such complex settings is the lighting and illuminance condition of the said habitats, which in the context of Mars, and generally deep space missions being far from the sun will certainly lead to an arduous task. To check the validity of the argument and assess the extent to which the natural light level available on the surface of Mars will be sufficient for the daily requirements of the crew and mission in terms of illuminance, the current manuscript presents thorough and detailed simulations and analyses on the availability evaluation of natural lighting in the site location of MHUs, namely Valles Marineris, Melas Chasma. In this paper solar irradiation parameters on Mars are calculated based on the previous research which resulted in global, direct and diffuse irradiance at 12 different Martian solar times. The simulations are distributed over the Martian year and its day-time, and for two extreme orientations of MHUs in their circular surrounding cluster, namely East/West and South/North units. The distribution of illuminance for each case, and trend comparison studies are then accompanied by numerical values and analyses on the percentage to which the natural lighting conditions on Mars have been shown to be sufficient as a fraction of the whole lighting load of the habitats, which is to be compensated using artificial sources. The corresponding values are shown to fall well in the range of 35–45% of the total lighting loads. Also, as the results of the simulations show, due to the consistency of the glazed parts of the designed façade through all exterior surface of the MHU, natural lighting sufficiency percentage does not show a significant difference between two simulated orientations. This fact further approves the circular orientation premise of the MHUs in their cluster.