Speaker
Description
Currently, the specific Martian thermal environment isn't fully automated and addressed within many space thermal analysis software, hence often critical parameters are simplified and dismissed. The Application Programming Interface (API) in ESATAN-TMS, first released in 2022 and updated in the 2025 release, provides a plugin interface and has been used to model configurable environments to support future lander and robotic studies.
This presentation showcases a plugin created to understand and model all types of phenomena on the Mars surface, such as transmissivity, convection, diffuse fluxes, sky and atmospheric temperatures. The script uses the Laboraroire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) 1D tool and offer guidelines toward using the Martian Climate Database (MCD) to provide inputs to the ESATAN-TMS model.
The diffuse solar fluxes are considered in a separate plugin that uses the UV Radiative Exchange Factors (UV REFs) of model shells to define the flux on each external shell via a boundary condition. A similar methodology is applied when considering the optical depth factor which is used to calculate the attenuation of solar fluxes, which creates a different solar flux at the surface compared to the top of the atmosphere. Finally, a convective heat transfer is defined between surface geometries and the sky, to consider the Martian wind for different scenarios.
Several landing sites from the phoenix lander and ExoMars rover were used as study cases to validate and correlate the model.
