Architecture of Sintered-Regolith Lunar Polar Microhabitats for Biofilm Research

This paper presents a parametric design framework for sintered-regolith microhabitats at the lunar poles and couples it to a low-order model of biofilm attachment, growth, and radiative damage on internal liner materials. The approach integrates three classes of open datasets: (i) polar illumination geometry derived from LOLA digital elevation models and horizon-based solar-track analysis; (ii) regolith thermophysical properties from Diviner radiometry and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) studies of solar and microwave sintering; and (iii) International Space Station (ISS) microbiology data, including environmental metagenomes, spaceflight biofilm experiments, and the OSD-554 Space Biofilms study on Pseudomonas aeruginosa.On the physical side, the framework parameterizes spherical-cap shells in terms of radius, rise, and thickness, estimates fractional illumination and UV dose from site-specific horizons, and solves one-dimensional multilayer conduction problems under polar boundary conditions to evaluate internal temperature ranges and sintering energy requirements. On the biological side, it employs a surface-attachment Monod model with a UV damage term, uses ISS-derived data as priors for effective kinetic parameters, and defines a scalar biofilm controllability index that interpolates between stainless-steel and liquid-infused-surface (LIS) inner liners.The combined pipeline produces multi-objective trade-offs between illumination and available solar power, sintering energy and shell geometry, internal thermal margins, and steady-state biofilm suppression for candidate liner materials. Although the results are not intended as quantitative habitat predictions, they show that existing open planetary and microbiological datasets can be integrated into a transparent, reproducible workflow for early-stage design of lunar polar microhabitats that must coexist with, and partially control, microbial life.