A video consisting of footage from Mars taken by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA's) Curiosity Rover on the planet is being shared on social media as first visuals from the moon sent by Chandrayaan-3's lander and rover.
The footage that is being shared on social media is a monochrome version of an extended video on YouTube. Further, the viral video is not the same as the official videos that have been released of the Chandrayaan-3 mission by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
On August 23, ISRO successfully landed a rover named Pragyaan on the southern pole of the moon, making India the first country to do so as part of its Chandrayaan-3 mission. The point of landing is called 'Shiv Shakti Point'. Following the successful landing, there has been multiple false claims surrounding the mission. BOOM has fact-checked several such claims of old and unrelated videos being misleadingly linked to the Chandrayaan-3 mission. Read the fact checks here.
The video showing monochromatic visuals of a hilly landscape has been captioned as, 'Chandrayaan-3 sent the first moon video after landing."
FactCheck
BOOM found a hardcoded line on the video's bottom that read, "This scene was captured with the Curiosity Rover's...". However, a Chandrayaan-3 watermark in Hindi on the top left corner of the screen looks more recent. Further, the alphabets 'ce' can be seen on the top left corner, which indicates that the text had been cut out.
BOOM used the captions from the video to perform a keyword search and was able to locate the following video on YouTube. The title of the video, uploaded by the channel Tavi Technical Space on August 8, 2023, is "Mars Rover's Panoramic Cam Capture Latest 360° Unexpected Weird 4K Video Footage of Mars Life." This shows that the video was uploaded more than two weeks before the Chandrayaan -3 mission made a soft landing on the moon's South Pole.
According to the description of the video, it shows footage from NASA's Curiosity Rover. The description states that the video was composed with multiple Live visuals capturing 360-degree real panorama images in 4k resolutions from Mars during the Mars 2023 missions. An excerpt from the description reads, "All panoramic scene made up with several images of Mars taken by onboard Mast cameras (panoramic cam) on sol 3899 and 3090 during the NASA mars mission."
The same visuals and captions can be seen from the 26 seconds mark into the video. The footage is similar, with the viral video being a discoloured version of the original.
The screengrab mentioned that the image was taken by Curiosity Rover's Mastcam on July 25, 2023, the 3899 Martian Day.
Taking a cue, BOOM scanned NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover website and found an almost similar image taken from the Curiosity shared on NASA's website. Here's is a comparison of the same.
The Curiosity Rover was launched in November 2012 and landed on Mars in August, 2013. It is still in service and has an active social media feed through NASA's Mars Science Laboratory.
Moreover, the video claiming to be from the moon shows extensive landscape. It is not similar to the landscape seen in the video footage officially released by ISRO.
The footage released by ISRO only shows a limited geography - the immediate surrounding on the moon of the Pragyaan rover landing zone. It also includes images of the surface of the moon.
ISRO also released images of the area surrounding Shiv Shakti Point.