Idaho engineer shares story of her ‘Mars’ adventure

A visit to Mars is still the stuff of best-selling fiction and big-budget Hollywood movies. But a North Idaho woman has played a real role in imagining the human experience on the fourth planet from the sun.

University of Idaho graduate Sophie Milam participated in a NASA-funded project that simulated a Mars mission and studied the biological, social and psychological challenges of being isolated and confined for a prolonged period. She and five others spent eight months living in a small dome on the slope of Mauna Loa, a volcano on the island of Hawaii.

“It was incredibly worthwhile,” said Milam, 27, a chemical analyst and systems engineer in Smelterville, Idaho, near Kellogg. “I learned a whole lot about everything – not only about all the different robotics and systems needed to create that kind of an environment, but a lot about the social aspect of teamwork and getting to be co-workers and friends and family with the same group of people.”

She will talk more about her experience on the HI-SEAS – the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation – at 6 p.m. Tuesday in a Science on Tap event at Gizmo, 806 N. Fourth St., Coeur d’Alene. A social will precede the talk at 5:30 p.m.

NASA aims to send people to the red planet by the 2030s and is starting to recruit the next generation of astronauts for such a mission. And even though she grew up dreaming about becoming an astronaut, Milam is more intrigued by the potential for unmanned missions in the coming years.

“Although I’d love to be a part of the first mission to Mars, I think a bit more research is needed before we’re ready to send people,” she said. “We’re ready to send robots now, which is wonderful and fascinating.”

Milam studied robotics during a fellowship at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and in the HI-SEAS dome she conducted research on tensegrity robots. The working parts of these “soft” robots are either in pure compression or pure tension, and the integrity of the structure depends on a jointless tension network.

Milam was chosen from hundreds of applicants around the world for the third HI-SEAS mission, which ended last June. The crew of three men and three women was mostly confined to a two-story, 36-feet-in-diameter geodesic habitat in an abandoned lava quarry. When they ventured outside, they had to wear mock spacesuits and visors to simulate life in an unpressurized space environment.

Researchers monitored the crew using surveillance cameras, body movement trackers and other methods to study the group’s cohesion and performance over time.

“I don’t feel I’ve ever learned so much about myself,” Milam said of her time in the dome. “The surprising part was the level of social activity that I found necessary to have a good quality of life in there.”

She finished her master’s degree in mechanical engineering, taking online courses through the UI, during her HI-SEAS stay. “First graduate of the University of Mars,” she jokes.

Milam was able to communicate with friends and family via email, but messages took 20 minutes to send or receive, just as they would if she were 140 million miles from Earth.

When she and her fellow Martians ended their mission last summer, they celebrated with a tandem parachute dive with the U.S. Army Golden Knights team.

Milam works for SVL Analytical, which conducts environmental analyses for the mining industry and water quality analyses. She’s helping develop industrial automation of manual processes.

Forbes Magazine last year chose her for its “30 Under 30 in Science” list of young scientists discovering new worlds in space and in our cells.