An animation video made to recreate the United States' historic Apollo 11 moon mission is being peddled with a false claim that American space agency NASA has released the footage showing a glimpse of Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 mission to the moon.
BOOM found that the video has been present online since 2021 and has no connection to the Chandrayaan-3 mission. The audio that can be heard in the video is also taken from Apollo space program conducted by NASA in the 1960s and 70s.
India's ambitious mission to the lunar south pole was successful on August 23, 2023, after the Vikram Lander made a soft landing on the moon. Chandrayaan-3, the Indian spacecraft, created history a week after the Russian space agency Roscosmos confirmed that their Luna 25 crash-landed on the lunar surface. Chandrayaan-3, which took off from Sriharikota on July 14 this year, is expected to conduct an in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during its mission.
Several old images and unrelated videos have gone viral as Chandrayaan-3.
The video is circulating with a caption that states, "*Nasa Actual Pictures of Chandrayan 3 Landing*".
Click here to view the post.
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Fact Check
BOOM broke the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search on one of the keyframes of the video. The search led us to a YouTube channel carrying the same video uploaded on July 20, 2023, with a caption mentioning the Apollo 11 moon landing mission that took place in 1969.
We then dug deeper to the YouTube channel named Hazegrayart and found that the channel uploaded several space animation videos on it.
On the other hand, we also found a longer version of the same video on the YouTube channel uploaded on June 8, 2021, with a similar description.
We further noticed that the viral video has been overlaid with a conversation and the song 'Vande Mataram' by A. R Rahman. The audio also contains the iconic lines "Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed." Tranquility base is the site of the Moon where the astronauts first walked whereas the Eagle refers to the spacecraft Lunar Module Eagle LM5.
The same conversation can be heard in a video uploaded on NASA's official YouTube channel on July 27, 2019, from 2 minutes onwards.
The video was uploaded with a description saying, "On July 20, 1969, humans walked on another world for the first time in history, achieving the goal that President John F. Kennedy had set in 1961, before Americans had even orbited the Earth. After a landing that included dodging a lunar crater and boulder field just before touchdown, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the area around their lunar landing site for more than two hours."
It further adds, "When the lunar module landed at 4:17 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel remained. Armstrong radioed "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Mission control erupted in celebration as the tension breaks, and a controller tells the crew "You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again.""
BOOM also reached out to the YouTube channel Hazegrayart for further information about the video. The article will be updated as and when we receive a response.