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>> My earliest interest in science really stemmed
from my love of nature and the outdoors and wanting
to understand why the world worked the way it worked
and why animals did the things that they did.
My parents recognized pretty early
on that I was a very curious kid, and did their best
to encourage that, and I was lucky enough to have teachers
who also instilled and fostered that curiosity in me.
My name is Erin Waggoner, and I'm an aerospace engineer
in the aerodynamics
and propulsion branch, and I work for NASA.
So, I got into engineering, and then I ultimately went
and majored in aerospace engineering
at Wichita State University and minored in math.
Because I knew I ultimately wanted to end up at NASA someday
for my career, I applied to be a co-op
through the school's co-op office.
The boom was very faint across the entire carpet.
So, I ended up getting picked up by NASA Armstrong and I came
out here sight-unseen.
I absolutely loved the work I was doing.
I started out on SOFIA, and the I had the luck to go over to CEV
and then X-48, so I got to see a lot of the very unique projects
that were coming through here in the early 2010s era.
And, I got a call, just before I was graduating from college,
with a formal job offer from here,
and it was my dream come true.
Essentially, my job entails everything
from planning a flight test all the way
through executing a fight test and looking
at the data afterwards.
My current project is the acoustic research measurement,
or ARM-3 flights.
ARM-3 uses a large microphone array that's set
up in a spiral pattern called a beam-forming microphone array
to measure aircraft noise off of a G-III, and essentially,
what we're doing is trying to measure aircraft noise and look
at aircraft noise mitigation measures.
So, we have various fairings and flaps and cavity treatments
that we've put on the airplane, and we're trying
to see what the effect of those treatments is
on the overall noise signature of the airplane.
>> Three, two, one, mark.
>> The beam-forming array is also called an acoustic camera.
It gives you a picture of an airplane that looks a lot
like a heat map, if you've ever seen a heat map,
but in the picture of the airplane that we end up getting,
red is noisy, or loud, instead of hot.
So, we can use this to tell where the noisiest parts
of the airplane are, and we can use this to figure out if any
of our mitigations have been successful,
and to what extent they have been successful.
>> [inaudible] copy.
Let's go ahead and move to 165, gear up.
>> Two zero.
>> During an ARM flight, the G-III flies, essentially,
an approach over the microphone array.
>> Three, two, one, descend, two point three.
>> Well, before they reach the array,
the pilots have throttled back the engines so that it's
as quiet as possible, from an engine perspective,
while they're over the array.
We also have them fly at various different airspeeds,
and with various different flap deflections,
because that will affect the noise signature.
So, on the other side of the sound barrier,
I do more acoustic research on the supersonic side of things.
It's not a boom that happens once, or it's not a boom
that happens once or twice, in that a lot of people think,
"Okay, so I've sped up.
I've broken through this sound barrier.
It's gone.
I'm no longer producing a sonic boom, and then when I slow down,
and I brake through it the other way,
now I'm going to make a boom."
It's really not like that.
It's more like a wake on a boat,
so as long as it's moving supersonically,
or over the speed of sound, you're going to continue
to drag, effectively, a wake of a sonic boom with you
through the air that will reach the ground.
I've worked on SonicBAT recently, and that was a test
to look at how sonic booms propagate
through a turbulent atmosphere.
During that project, I had the privilege to fly in the TG-14
and record the sonic booms between where they were produced
on the aircraft and where they were recorded on the ground.
The rationale behind using the TG-14 is it's
because it's a motorized glider, so the engine can be turned off
and on in the middle of a flight,
and it's a very quiet aircraft.
So, the F-18 would produce the boom
from a very specific location and at a very specific airspeed.
The TG-14 would record the boom as it had propagated
through the atmosphere prior to it hitting the turbulent layer,
and then the microphone arrays
on the ground would have record how that sonic boom sounded
on the ground after it had gone through the layer of turbulence.
The way I describe engineering now is
that you have this giant puzzle, and you have
to follow some rules in order to solve your problem,
but the only rules that you have to follow are physics and math.
And, if you follow physics and math
and you can find the right technology,
you can solve any problem you want to solve.
>> Go on up.
>> I mean, ultimately, I just feel very blessed
to be able to work here.
That's what I wanted.
You can't let anybody define your path for you.
>> Six flight copy, clear takeoff [inaudible].
>> You have to have the confidence in yourself to go
after your goals and to go after your dreams,
and you can't let those people deter you.
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