Columbus St. Francis DeSales High School senior Emma Hahn traveled to Louisiana last month to present at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) national meeting. She joined a team of students from across the country that shared their design, prototype and analysis on a completely original design for a quiet commercial supersonic plane modeled after NASA’s X-59. The goal was to design a passenger plane that could fly over land with minimal disturbance. This group, named X-59: Lowering the Sonic Boom, began its research this past summer at the prestigious STEM Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) high school internship program in collaboration with the University of Texas Center for Space Research and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). To help prepare for the recent AGU, she spent her NASA Independent Study class at St. Francis DeSales with science teacher Mrs. Mulligan, doing more mathematical and aerodynamic analysis of the prototype.