Unrelated Visuals Passed Off as Live Visuals of Moon Captured by Chandrayaan-3

We found that old visuals are being shared with users falsely linking them to ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 moon landing.

Fact-Check | The visuals seen in the viral video are unrelated to Chandrayaan-3 moon landing.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

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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