NASA scientists from Langley Research Center in Virginia and Armstrong Flight Research Center in California plan to conduct a series of data-gathering flights over Galveston for about two weeks in November.
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Letters are going out to 500 residents in Galveston this week to explain what's going to happen. People who get the letters will receive $2 just for considering the study.
Anyone who decides to help NASA out will be paid $25 a week, according to a spokesperson from Logical Innovations, a space agency partner.
Those volunteers will need to log in to a website to let NASA know what they heard, if anything, and what they felt about the sound.
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At the same time, audio sensors placed around the city will provide researchers a measure of scientific ground truth about how loud the noise really was.
"We'll never know exactly what everyone heard. We won't have a noise monitor on their shoulder inside their home. But we'd like to at least have an estimate of the range of noise levels that they actually heard," said Alexandra Loubeau, NASA's team lead for sonic boom community response research at Langley.
The testing is expected to begin in early November.