Old visuals from the surface of Mars are viral online as clips taken by Chandrayaan-3 on the moon. BOOM found that the claims are false and the clips have been taken by NASA's Perseverance Rover during a separate space mission.
Chandrayaan-3 achieved a historic feat on August 23 after landing its Vikram lander and Pragyan rover on the southern surface of the moon. The rover will now undertake a 14-day mission to conduct experiments on the moon's surface and send its findings back on the Earth through the lander.
Amid this, two visuals showing a planet are viral online as images taken of the moon from Chandrayaan-3. The first visual shows a rover and the second visual shows the tracks of the rover's wheel on the planet.
A caption on Facebook reads, "BIG BREAKING: First video from the *MOON* 🌙 Release.... ISRO has released the video that the whole world is waiting for. This is the video recorded by the camera mounted on the Chandrayaan-3 lander while it was landing on the moon. While this video started a few km before the lander landed on the moon, it was recorded until it landed on *MOON* 🌙. So far ISRO has released only the photos taken by the lander, but this is the first time that a video of the process of landing on the moon has been released."
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
The second visual with the track marks of the rover also zoom in on an object on the planet's surface. A title on YouTube reads, "Vikram and pragnan found some thing on moon#shorts#"
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that both the clips were taken by NASA's Perseverance Rover on Mars and are unrelated to Chandrayaan-3's landing on the moon.
Visual 1
A reverse image search of this visual led us to a post on X by NASA Astrobiology's official handle that had uploaded a photo of the Perseverance Rover on February 19, 2022. The post commemorated the one year anniversary of Perseverance's landing on Mars.
Taking a clue from this, we searched for the visual using keywords like 'Mars' and found the viral visual uploaded on YouTube on August 27, 2023. It was titled "Mars planet part 2 #shorts #shortsviral #ytshorts #marsplanet"
We also found a video by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's official channel uploaded on December 29, 2021 titled 'NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover Milestones - 2021 Year in Review'. A still of the Perseverance rover at the 0:35 mark of the video is an exact match to the viral visuals.
Visual 2
A reverse image search of some key visuals led us to a post shared by the official X handle of NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover. The post carried a photo of the 10 sample tubes deposited by the rover on Mars and even carried a link to NASA's website that included an interactive view to the image.
Below is a screenshot of a zoomed in version of the image using the website's interactive view:
Click here to view.
Here is a comparison between the image on NASA's website and the viral visuals:
The Perseverance rover is part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It was launched from Florida on July 30, 2020 and landed on Mars' Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The main task of the rover is to collect rock and soil samples for closer examination on Earth and look for signs of any possible ancient life on Mars. The second viral visual shows Amalik, one of ten titanium tubes deposited on Mars to collect samples of rocks and dust.