Parker Solar Probe not on mission to stop 'internet apocalypse' | Fact check

Nate Trela, USA TODAY
Updated ·3 min read
2

The claim: NASA sent the Parker Solar Probe on a mission to prevent an ‘internet apocalypse’

A June 26 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) has a video captioned, "This means we are about to experience internet blackout!"

“Family, I hope you're ready because no internet connection is coming soon," a man says. The video later shows a picture of the Parker Solar Probe behind him, with the narrator saying, "This is the probe that they have sent to try to stop it."

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Our rating: False

The Parker Solar Probe was launched to study the sun, not to stop an internet apocalypse. While solar winds could theoretically interfere temporarily with telecommunications, NASA has never connected preventing an "internet apocalypse" to the mission.

Probe studying the sun

The Parker Solar Probe was launched Aug. 12, 2018, to study the flow of energy from the sun, the heating of the solar atmosphere and what accelerates the solar wind, according to Denise Hill, a NASA spokesperson. Stopping an “internet apocalypse” was not one of the missions.

Hill said the claim may be tied to NASA’s acknowledgment for more than a decade that solar wind – a stream of charged particles from the sun’s outermost atmosphere – could potentially disrupt communications signals. The sun goes through an 11-year cycle with periods of low and high solar activity, and the next high is expected in 2024 or 2025.

The Parker Solar Probe has already addressed one of the big questions it sought to answer, determining the process that creates “fast solar wind” that can send charged particles toward Earth in mere minutes. Authors of a recent paper hold that the information could help predict future solar storms.

“However, there is no evidence that shows it would cause long-term catastrophic effects on the internet,” Hill said.

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Fears of communications disruption are not unfounded, however. NASA has warned since at least 2009 that solar wind along with periodic expulsions of matter from the sun called coronal mass ejections has the potential to wreak havoc on electrical grids and “induce extreme currents” that could disrupt signals that travel over wires. It does not, however, call it an "internet apocalypse."

The term “internet apocalypse” appears to stem from a paper on solar storms presented at a conference in August 2021 that used the term in its title. One of the paper’s authors later expressed regret over the attention the paper received.

A significant communication disruption has happened before. In 1859, a massive solar flare set off an electromagnetic storm that spawned bright auroras in the sky and sent currents through telegraph lines powerful enough to shock operators and start fires.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: No, NASA did not send probe to stop 'internet apocalypse' | Fact check