Examining the Relationship Between Atmospheric Turbulence and Metric Variability at NASA Quesst Mission Phase 2 Dry Run

In preparation for the NASA Quesst Mission Phase 2 acoustic validation flights of the X-59 aircraft, NASA conducted a dry run flight test with F-15 aircraft. Complementary to NASA instrumentation deployed to measure the sonic booms, a ground-based, two-dimensional microphone array, ARray Instrumentation for Sonic Thump Observations in TurbuLEnce (ARISTOTLE), was used to measure 19 of the sonic booms in the Mojave Desert, CA during summer 2025. ARISTOTLE included a total of 61 microphones arranged as a cross with 50 ft spacing between microphones and a denser grid of microphones in the center with 25 ft spacing. Turbulence parameters have been estimated from measured meteorological data. In this paper, the turbulence parameters are correlated with physical properties of the waveforms, such as spatial correlation length, rise time, and high-frequency spectral slopes. With a deeper understanding of the sonic boom waveforms’ variability, the turbulence conditions are then related to variation in human perception-based metrics across the array. [Work supported through a NASA Graduate Research Fellowship.]