Background

A Mars habitat is a proposed facility for humans to live on Mars. Mars is a very hostile environment to support life as it has almost no oxygen in the air, it gets extremely cold, it has low atmospheric pressure, and experiences high radiation. Therefore, a habitat on Mars would need to entirely contain and sustain its humans and provide for everything that they would need to survive, including plants, and possibly animals. Matters get even more complicated when attempting to deal with harmful cosmic radiation, which is not an easy problem to solve. The human, animal, and plant inhabitants would need to be enclosed in pressurised and temperature-controlled structures. A Mars habitat would likely contain a host of components such as space-suits, rovers, aircraft, drones, landers, storage tanks, communication infrastructure, earth-moving equipment, and do forth. One of the biggest challenges will be in transporting building material to Mars, for example to transport a single brick from the Earth is estimated to cost $2 million US dollars. Therefore, the idea is to make use of materials found on Mars to construct the habitat, where possible. The goal of such a habitat would be to further our scientific knowledge of the cosmos, to study ways to ensure the survival of the human species, and to explore the possibility of extracting resources from other planets.
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The design brief

Design a Mars habitat with all the facilities and services required to sustain at least 12 people on Mars for an extended period of time. Your Mars habitat ought to provide for the astronauts going about their daily activities, including preparing food, eating, sleeping, washing, and conducting scientific experiments and other vital functions. Consider too, the astronauts’ transport needs on Mars and for shuttling to and from Earth. Note: it is up to you whether to consider the problem of cosmic radiation in space, as this kind of radiation can seriously harm the health of any human being or other living creature that ventures beyond Low Earth Orbit. You may, for the purpose of this exercise, ignore this seemingly intractable problem. Build a small-scale model of your city-in-a-building to demonstrate your design concept to your fellow students and teachers. Alternatively, you may build a computer-aided design (CAD) model of your design concept, if you prefer. Work on this project in a team with a group of your classmates.

The design thinking process

Follow the six stages of the design thinking process to ensure that you are thorough and do everything necessary to succeed in your design project. First, you endeavour to understand the design topic and EMPATHISE with the needs of the users. With that understanding, you can DEFINE what is essential to the product or system that you are designing. Then you IDEATE, that is, you creatively come up with ideas and develop them. The next step is to PROTOTYPE your chosen design solution in a physical form and improve it through trial-and-error. Then you TEST your design idea to elicit the opinions of users. And finally, at the end of the process, you REFLECT upon your project to benefit from the experience. Use the appropriate methods from the Design Thinking for Schools website as you proceed along the design thinking process.
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Note for teachers

Read the guide for teachers on Safety for the PROTOTYPE Stage for Level IV to safely supervise this design project.