Design and Analysis of Homes for Mars Habitats

Abstract

Astronauts need a strong yet portable home design to live on Mars. This paper proposes using an inflatable home with an inflatable carbon fiber internal truss structure covered by a thick silica aerogel tarp to house the astronauts. The internal truss structure is inflatable, i.e., a bar is an inflatable cylinder that contains a central cord, and therefore, it has a variable stiffness in tension and compression where the compression stiffness depends on the internal pressure of the bar. Thus, we introduced alpha ratios as the ratio between the stiffness in compression to tension. To ensure the home’s safety, we designed a program in Python that analyzes the home for element forces, reaction forces, and displacements using the direct stiffness method. The design objective is to minimize the deflection of the structure. Three external forces were considered in the program: gravity, internal-to-external pressure difference, and drag force. Taking α = 0.001, the maximal displacement was 0.049 m whereas the average displacement was 0.0008 m. These results show that the Mars home design could easily withstand the forces it would experience on Mars.