On 23 August, India etched history and became the first country to land a spacecraft near the south pole of the moon.
A video is now being shared on the internet with a claim that it shows 'live visuals' of the moon captured by Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3.
What have users said?: Those sharing the video have uploaded it with a caption in Hindi that said, "Live image of Moon's south pole sent by ISRO by Chandrayaan-3."
An archive of the post can be found here.
(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
We received a query about the same video on our WhatsApp tipline. You can view archives of more such claims here, here, and here.
What is the truth?: The visuals seen in the viral video have been taken from different videos available online. They are unrelated to Chandrayaan-3. No such visuals have been shared by ISRO.
How did we find out?: We divided the video into several keyframes using Google Chrome extension InVID WeVerify and performed a reverse image search on them.
Video 1
A Google search led us to a longer version of the video, which carried several similarities as seen in the viral clip.
It was uploaded on an unverified YouTube channel called 'University of Aberdeen'.
The video was titled "Mapping planet and moon craters with Meta AI's SAM" and was uploaded on 1 May.
At around the 0:30 timestamp of the video, we found that the viral video and the one uploaded on YouTube are the same.
A comparison shows that both the videos are the same.
(Source: YouTube/Screenshot/Altered by The Quint)
We could not find the source of the part that immediately comes after the first video and shows a pan of the terrain. However, it was not available or shared by ISRO.
Video 3
We found the same video through a Yandex search uploaded on YouTube on a verified channel called 'Som ET'.
Its description mentioned, "Images taken by MAHLI onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 2666 (2020-02-05). NASA Images."
The video was uploaded on 18 June.
Video 4 & 5
Team WebQoof found these visuals were also taken from the verified YouTube channel 'Som ET'.
It was uploaded on 15 July and was titled, "Som ET - 58 - Mars - Perseverance Sol 850."
Visuals shared by ISRO: The national space agency shared visuals on X (formerly known as Twitter) of the Pragyan rover roaming around Shiv Shakti Point.
Conclusion: Old and unrelated visuals were stitched together and shared with a false claim that it shows a “live video” taken by ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3.
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