Aerospace Education

Lt. Kim Russell is our Aerospace Education Officer
C/2dLt Patrick Stack is our Cadet Aerospace Education Officer

Supersonic Diving: Quieting the Boom

06.18.09
A NASA F-18 dives toward a targeted area of Edwards AFB during a SonicBOBS calibration flight. (NASA Photo / Tom Tschida) Sonic booms are a part of life at Edwards Air Force Base and in surrounding communities, so booms generated on June 11 by two F/A-18s from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center went relatively unnoticed. The exception included several NASA and Gulfstream engineers monitoring boom recording and measuring devices located in the Air Force Flight Test Center's museum and at a seismometer located on base.
Called Sonic Booms On Big Structures, or SonicBOBS, Phase 0, these flights were preliminary calibration flights for an upcoming NASA study scheduled for September that is designed to gather sonic boom data on larger buildings.
The project is part of a NASA effort to characterize the effect of sonic booms on ground structures. It is part of the agency's sonic boom reduction technology research to help make overland supersonic cruise a reality.
“We recorded nine loud and quiet sonic booms with a variety of sensors, both inside and outside buildings," said Ed Haering, Dryden's principal investigator for the SonicBOBS project. "These data will be used to tailor the experiment design for September’s flights,” Haering said.
For the flights, the two NASA F-18s flew both straight supersonic flight profiles as well as a unique supersonic diving profile designed to present a quieter sonic boom to specific locations along their flight path. The F-18s flew in Edwards' High Altitude Supersonic Corridor at 32,000 to 40,000 feet for the supersonic runs.
SonicBOBS complements previous efforts in 2006 and 2007 to measure the pressure and loudness of sonic booms on both older-and newer-construction base housing.
Joseph Gavin of Gulfstream Aerospace and NASA co-op student Thomas Williams monitor sonic boom recording equipment placed in the Edwards Air Force Base Museum for the SonicBOBS calibration flights. Window rattle and other contact-induced acoustic sources are important aspects of the high frequency response inside a building subjected to sonic booms. The earlier base housing research showed that indoor noise from sonic booms might be more annoying than the same booms heard outdoors.