NASA quesst mission—Community response testing plans

Abstract

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has made a commitment to deliver data to the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (ICAO CAEP) defining community response to sounds from supersonic aircraft designed such that their sonic boom is replaced with a soft “thump” sound. The dataset will be a correlation of public perceptions of these sounds to the corresponding acoustic levels and will support efforts to develop international standards for permissible noise from supersonic overflight. The NASA Quesst mission is developing the X-59, a unique research aircraft capable of quiet supersonic flight, and will use the aircraft in a series of community overflight tests to measure acoustic levels of its “sonic thump” and related public response. This presentation will provide an overview of the Quesst mission, including X-59 development, acoustic validation, and community testing with a focus on the plans and technical goals for those community response tests. In addition, results of a NASA-sponsored international workshop on strategies and considerations for key aspects of the community test phase of the Quesst mission, including estimating noise exposure levels and conducting surveys to support the dataset development, will be briefed.