The claim: NASA is launching ‘three rockets at three moons’ during eclipse
A March 30 Facebook video (direct link, archive link) shows a man talking about NASA’s purported plans for the upcoming April 8 solar eclipse.
“NASA is shooting up three rockets on the eclipse and guess what they’re calling it? Serpent’s deity,” the man says. “Shooting three rockets at three moons, and all the masses will be out with their glasses to watch it.”
The post also includes a picture that the man claims shows three moons in the sky.
NASA plans to launch three rockets during the April 8 eclipse to study the effect on the upper atmosphere. The Earth has only one moon, though many other objects, such as satellites, orbit the planet too.
NASA plans to launch three rockets during the total solar eclipse that will cross the U.S. on the afternoon of April 8. However, those rockets will not be pointed at “three moons,” as the Facebook video claims.
The rockets are sounding rockets and will be launched into the moon’s shadow during the eclipse to study what happens in the upper atmosphere when sunlight briefly dims over a part of the planet, according to a detailed description of the operation on NASA’s website. The rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at three different times: 45 minutes before, during and 45 minutes after the eclipse peaks locally.
“These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications,” the agency’s website says.
The ionosphere is part of the atmosphere that sits at the edge of space, roughly 50 to 400 miles above the Earth’s surface. The rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of about 260 miles. The moon, for comparison, is on average about 238,000 miles from Earth.
The mission to launch rockets during the eclipse is called “Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path,” or “APEP,” not “serpent’s deity,” as the Facebook video claims. However, the acronym was selected because Apep is the name of a serpent god from ancient Egyptian cosmology “who pursued the sun god Ra and every so often nearly consumed him, resulting in an eclipse,” NASA’s website says.
NASA launched the same rockets during a solar eclipse in October 2023.
The man in the video also implies an image of the moon featured in the post proves there are three moons. The image shows what appears to be the moon and two other faded versions of the celestial body close by.
But the moon is the “Earth’s only natural satellite,” according to NASA. It’s the “brightest and largest object in our night sky,” it stabilizes the Earth’s wobble on its axis and causes tides.
And while millions of objects orbit the planet – from satellites to space junk – the Earth has only one moon.
The image of the moon in the Facebook video is consistent with lens flare, “an optical phenomenon which can affect image quality and appear as discs of (color) streaking across an image,” according to Canon’s EOS magazine. It happens when light reflects off the lenses inside cameras, making it possible “for multiple images of the subject to be formed.”