Why a Fighter Jet Is Testing 'Quiet' Supersonic Booms Over Texas

This November, onlookers will get to hear a so-called "quiet" sonic boom as a supersonic military jet zips through the skies of Galveston, Texas, according to NASA.

NASA is trying to build a supersonic jet that can break the sound barrier while avoiding earsplitting sonic booms altogether, Live Science previously reported — but the agency is not there yet.

So instead, they're testing another supersonic plane, an F/A-18 Hornet aircraft, to investigate the impact of ordinary and quieter sonic booms so that NASA can determine how much sonic noise people on the ground deem acceptable in their everyday lives. [Supersonic! The 10 Fastest Military Airplanes]

During the tests, the F/A-18 Hornet will dive through the air, making loud sonic booms over the Gulf of Mexico and quieter booms over the coastal city of Galveston. By rating the feedback from the audio sensors and about 500 local volunteers on the ground, NASA scientists will get a better idea of what people think of the plane's volume.

"We'll never know exactly what everyone heard. We won’t have a noise monitor on their shoulder inside their home," Alexandra Loubeau, NASA’s team lead for sonic boom community response research at Langley, Virginia, said in a statement. "But we’d like to at least have an estimate of the range of noise levels that they actually heard."