By Shrey Banerjee
A stock video showing close-up visuals of the surface of the moon in motion is circulating on Facebook with claims that it shows the latest visuals of the moon as seen from Chandrayaan 3's Vikram lander.
The Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) lunar mission Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander made a successful soft-landing on the Moon on August 23, 6.04 pm. This is ISRO's third lunar mission with India being the first country to land on the South Pole of the Moon. The mission began on July 14 and inserted the orbit of the moon on August 5.
BOOM found that this video is a stock footage. According to the websites containing the footage, the visuals were furnished by NASA.
One such post on Facebook is captioned as, "Visuals of Moo(n) from Chandrayaan 3 #isro #chandrayaan...". (sic.)
The link of the post can be seen here.
The archive of the post can be seen here.
A similar post has been shared with the caption, "The visuals of moon from Chandrayaan 3 are simply stunning #chandrayaan #isro #india". The link of the post can be viewed here and the archive of the post can be seen here.
Fact Check
BOOM first ran a search for visuals of the lunar surface posted by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for Chandrayaan-3 but was unable to find the same viral video.
ISRO, however, shared a few videos of glimpses of the moon taken from the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan-3 mission. Some of the videos can be seen here and here.
We then divided the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search on the keyframes; we found the same video posted on YouTube on June 10, 2023.
This video was posted more than a month before the launch of Chandrayaan-3, which took place on July 14, 2023, at 2.35pm from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
The video is captioned as, "Textured surface of the moon close-up in motion". The video contains a watermark similar to the one used by ShutterStock.
Taking a cue from the above, we ran a relevant keyword search and found a video on the photo and video library ShutterStock website available in multiple high definition video formats.
The stock footage is captioned as, "Textured surface of the moon close-up in motion. 3d animation. Elements of this image furnished by NASA". The contributor of the video is a profile named FlashMovie. The video can be viewed here. FlashMovie is a regular contributor to ShutterStock having contributed more than 8,000 royalty-free videos.
BOOM then ran a keyframe comparison between the video viral on social media and the one available on the ShutterStock website. We found a same pattern of the surface craters and movement of the capturing camera in a similar alignment in both the videos.
We also found the video uploaded to FlashMovie's own website captioned as, "Textured surface of the moon close-up in motion. Textured surface of the moon close-up in motion. 3d animation. Elements of this image furnished by NASA", the link of which can be seen here.
We also found this video in another online stock footage library EnvatoElements. This video also contains similar captions as in the earlier stock video library sites. The link of the video can be viewed here.
