NASA Glenn Research Center Acoustical Testing Laboratory: Five year retrospective

In the five years since the NASA Glenn Research Center Acoustical Testing Laboratory (ATL) opened its doors in September, 2000, it has developed a comprehensive array of services and products that support hearing conservation goals within NASA and industry. The ATL provides acoustic emission testing and noise control engineering services for a variety of specialized customers, particularly developers of equipment and science experiments manifested for NASA’s manned space missions. The ATL aggressively supports the vision of a low-noise on-orbit environment, which facilitates mission success as well as crew health, safety, and comfort. In concert with these goals, the ATL also produces and distributes free educational resources and low-noise advocacy tools for hearing conservation education and awareness. Among these are two compact discs of auditory demonstrations (of phenomena in acoustics, hearing conservation, and communication), and presentations, software packages, and other educational materials for use by engineers, audiologists, and other hearing conservation stakeholders. This presentation will highlight ATL’s construction, history, technical capabilities, and current projects and will feature demonstrations of some of the unique educational resource materials that are distributed by the ATL.