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Catching the Sonic Boom From the NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Capsule Re-entry

Description: 

In collaboration with Sandia National Laboratory, we deployed a seismoacoustic array at the Eureka Country airport, Nevada, to record the sonic boom generated by the capsule re-entry of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission on September 24, 2023. We fielded a 1 km aper- ture array, consisting of a 3 × 6 Golay array and two acoustic subarrays. All the seismic and acoustic instruments successfully recorded the double sonic booms. We also per- formed a 94 m long refraction survey including 48 geophones with a corner frequency at 28 Hz to map the near-surface P- and S-wave velocity structure near each infrasound ar- ray. According to the seismic data frequency-wavenumber analysis, the incident acoustic wave (an amplitude of less than 1 Pa) impinged on our array with a horizontal slowness of 0.35 s/km, corresponding to a velocity of about 2.85 km/s with an azimuth of nearly N2°E and an incidence angle of around 6.5◦. The FK analysis also illustrates additional energy at different azimuth and slowness values. The denoised radial components of the Golay array demonstrate the incident acoustic wave with horizontal slowness of 0.30 s/km (3.33 km/s) and an azimuth of less than 6◦. This discrepancy in slowness and az- imuth of vertical and radial components could be evidence of scattering. Moreover, array site earth model is inferred from a near-surface refraction and surface wave dispersion techniques. The resulting first-order layered P-and S-wave velocity models derived from the refraction data show five layers of unconsolidated sediments up to 33 m, including two low-velocity zones. Using the velocity models, we generated ground motion syn- thetic seismograms and surface pressure to investigate the observed Golay array ground motion and acoustic data. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms governing the conversion of acoustic wave energy into seismic waves and explore the wave propaga- tion in the near surface.

Session: Data-driven and Computational Characterization of Non-earthquake Seismoacoustic Sources - I

Type: Oral

Date: 4/16/2025

Presentation Time: 02:00 PM (local time)

Presenting Author: Sonia

Student Presenter: Yes

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