NASA Tests Ground Recording Equipment for X-59’s Future Quiet Supersonic Flights

NASA recently completed a series of tests to reduce risks prior to Phase 2 of its Quesst mission, which will test the ability of the X-59 experimental aircraft to make sonic booms quieter. The third series of Carpet Determination in Entirety Measurements (CarpetDIEM) flights examined the quality of a new generation of ground recording system units. They also allowed NASA to test the operational procedures needed to deploy the recording systems and retrieve the data they collect. For the tests, NASA set up 10 ground recording system units over a 30-mile stretch of California desert. Using an F-15 and an F-18 from NASA Armstrong, the testing involved 20 supersonic passes with speeds ranging from Mach 1.15 to Mach 1.4 and at altitudes ranging from 40,000 feet to 53,000 feet. Three of the passes involved an F-18 conducting a special inverted dive maneuver to produce a quiet sonic boom, with one getting as quiet as 67 perceived level decibels (PLdB). The testing also validated the use of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, ADS-B, an existing technology flown on all commercial aircraft and most private aircraft to report speed and position, to trigger the GRS units to begin recording. During Quesst Phase 2, NASA will spread 70 ground recording stations over a 30-mile test site to record the quiet sonic thumps of the X-59. RT: 5:23 Interview excerpts RT: 2:26 Forrest Carpenter CarpetDIEM III Principal Investigator Larry Cliatt Quesst Phase 2 Sub-Project Manager Quesst Acoustic Validation Technical Lead Super: NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center Center contact: Matt Kamlet, 661-276-2330 HQ contact: Robert Margetta, 202-763-5012 For more info: www.nasa.gov/quesst

What is said in the film

It's the altitude and the location of the airplane or the speed of the airplane. This is our antenna. Yes. and we're turning in Ops check 8. 9 Ops check 8.

9, turning in 836, one minute one minute, one minute mark Copy that PI Are you ready for the report? go ahead. Yeah, We've got solid double booms or sonic booms across the entire array. So carpet in three is about getting ready and setting up and understanding the logistics and the instrumentation and all the operations required to execute phase two or the acoustic validation phase of the Quest X 59 mission. I always like to say that the phase two is the the exciting part of the Quest mission.

Right now, we're in phase one. We're building the airplane. We're getting it safe to fly. We're going to do what they call envelope expansion, making sure the airplane is safe to fly at very slow speeds and at fast speeds as well. But once we get to phase two is where the real excitement and the instrumentation happens, that's when we actually start measuring the sonic boom and making sure that all of our design tools, all of our validation tools match what we've designed them to do.

So a huge challenge for these measurements are 70 sensors spread 30 miles across. And in order to mechanize and to operate all of those sensors, we can't have 70 different people at every single instrumentation box. So we had to find a way to kind of automate that process. So each of the GRS sensors or the ground recording systems are specially equipped with an unintended remote operating triggering system. It uses the ADS-B signal or the broadcast from the airplane on the ground.

We're able to use that broadcast from the airplane to calculate how fast the airplane is going, how high it's flying and where it is. And that information is sent to our sensors on the ground and triggers when the airplane is close enough for us to record the sonic boom, we're trying to ascertain and answer. The question is like, how many people does it take to go out and service these instruments on a daily basis and to get data back? You know, how how many vehicles? All those sorts of things.

Just how do we operate? And because this is a very this will be a very large scale when we are doing x 59. And so we're trying to answer get the answers to the hard questions first and not the day before. An x 59 flight. The X-59 project is an incredible project.

It's definitely a once in a once in a generation. It'll be a moment in history, aviation history, and to be a part of that and to be able to help that program succeed is making me feel very, very privileged and very honored to be a part of that program.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from NASA. NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.