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Base
Environment
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Model check
The science
What is modelled
A small Mars base over many sols: solar and reactor power, a battery, heating of the domes, life support, electrolysis oxygen, ice mining and a greenhouse. Every constant is a stated design value, not a measurement of a real mission.
Sunlight
Solar constant at Mars distance S0 = L / (4 pi r^2): 586 W/m2 at 1.524 AU, about 715 at perihelion and 490 at aphelion. Sun height from cos z = sin(lat) sin(dec) + cos(lat) cos(dec) cos(w) with hour angle w (a sol is 24 h 39.6 min).
Dust follows Beer-Lambert: the direct beam is exp(-tau / cos z). At tau 4-5 (a global storm) almost no direct light is left, but scattered light still reaches the panels; here half of 40 % of the scattered fraction is counted as diffuse. That diffuse term is a rough assumption.
Power and heat
PV power = arrays x 55 m2 x 28 % x irradiance x (1 - dust on panels). Dome heat loss is UA (T_in - T_out) with UA = U x 2 pi R^2 per hemispherical dome (U = 0.30 W/m2K for a thick regolith shell, 0.5 for glass) and a thermal mass of 4e7 J/K per dome. The outside temperature is a simple day-night cosine around -60 C whose swing shrinks in dust.
Oxygen, water and ice
Electrolysis 2 H2O -> 2 H2 + O2 needs 2 x 285.83 kJ per mole of O2, that is 4.96 kWh per kg of O2 at 100 % efficiency; with a 70 % electrolyser it is 7.1 kWh/kg. A crew member uses 0.84 kg O2 per day; 1.125 kg of water is consumed per kg of O2. Ice mining must warm the ice and melt it (about 0.45 MJ/kg plus drilling); a unit here delivers 4 kg/h for 2.8 kW. The greenhouse is assumed to give 0.28 kg O2 per m2 of crop per day.
Regolith printing
A hemispherical shell of radius R and thickness t has volume V = 2 pi (R^3 - (R-t)^3) / 3. One printer robot is assumed to lay 1.2 m3 per hour, so the print time is V / (1.2 n).
What is simplified
- One latitude, one season; no polar night effects or orbital eccentricity during the run.
- Dust on panels is a constant you set, not a deposition model.
- Battery round trip is 92 % each way; no thermal limits.
- Not drawn to scale: the reactor would sit far from the habitat.
In-page checks
Five checks run in the page: the solar constant two ways, an RK4 integration of the attenuation law, electrolysis energy from enthalpy and from Gibbs free energy plus T dS, the dome shell volume from summed rings, and the bookkeeping of the energy flows of the running simulation.