A wide-area system for tracking supersonic aircraft overflights and capturing their shock waves

An Internet-based, geographically-distributed prototype system for capturing sonic booms produced by NASA’s low boom flight demonstrator (LBFD) aircraft has been successfully field tested. The system is designed to track supersonic LBFD flights over distances of hundreds of miles so that interviewing of overflown populations can be synchronized with the time of arrival of their sonic booms in multiple, widely separated communities. A central server archives reports of reception of the demonstrator aircraft’s ADS-B signals from multiple field receivers, calculates shock wave arrival times at interviewing sites, captures and stores the acoustic waveform produced at the predicted time of arrival of the boom, coordinates interview start and stop time with sonic boom arrival times, uploads the captured waveforms on demand, and provides multiple, geographically-distributed analysts with password protected, remote access to the flight tracking and acoustic information in near-real time.