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available for FAA and NASA decision making. At the end of the day, Project 8 will have attempted to provide the best information possible so that regulatory policy decisions are well-informed decisions.
Future plans
There are currently no plans to have another International Sonic Boom Forum anytime soon. The organ- izers of the ISBF have indicated interest in having a sonic boom themed special session at an upcoming ASA meeting, and this is now planned for the Fall 2006 joint meeting of the ASA and the Acoustical Society of Japan in Honolulu. It does seem that with its many technical committees, but especially noise, physical acoustics, and psychological and physiologi- cal acoustics, the appropriate home for sonic boomers is the Acoustical Society of America.
There are a number of major ways in which the various university and government researchers, including those involved with PARTNER Project 8, are likely to proceed in the next several years. Firstly, all subjective testing is current- ly focused on outdoor sonic boom waveforms. But without question an assessment of the reaction of people indoors to low-boom sonic boom waveforms should be attempted as soon as it is practicable. It is just that it is difficult to perform such testing. One challenge is that people very well may react differently in their own homes than they would in a labora- tory environment designed to look like a home. One tech- nique that already has been tried successfully is to place in
Fig. 7. Jury testing participants listen to sonic booms from F-18 aircraft out in the desert at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. The subjects later listened to repro- duced sonic booms in a simulator to tell if the simulator sounded realistic. To pro- tect the identities of the participants, their faces have been obscured. (Photo by Kathleen Hodgdon.)
away, it is available for PARTNER Project 8 activity envi- sioned for the future.
PARTNER Project 8 aims to provide a knowledge base of signatures and the relative acceptability of those signatures, indoors and outdoors, by the population. By including infor- mation from atmospheric turbulence, aircraft operations, and human perceptual response, good information will be
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