By Archis Chowdhury
An animated video showing a lunar lander landing on the moon is viral on the internet as a footage of Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander, which landed successfully on the lunar South Pole on August 23, 2023.
BOOM found these posts to be false; the video going viral is actually an animated clip of the unmanned Blue Moon lander, made by American aerospace and defence company Blue Origin.
Following the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, the internet has been flooded with false claims around the mission, along with the individuals involved in it. BOOM has fact-checked multiple claims on old or unrelated videos and images being falsely linked to the mission.
Also Read:News Outlets Link Old Video of BBC Criticising India’s Space Mission To Chandrayaan-3
A user shared the video on Facebook Reels, with a Hindi text caption, that translates to English as, "Today India will make history. Jai Hind, Jai Bharat." Click here to view the reel, and here to view an archive version.
We also found the same video being shared on YouTube, with captions claiming it to be a footage of the successful landing of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
Fact Check
BOOM ran several keyframes of the video on Google's reverse image search, and came across several articles about a large lunar lander called Blue Moon, made by Jeff Bezos-owned aerospace and defence company Blue Origin.
Blue Moon is a series of lunar landers, that have been designed to carry both cargo and humans to the Moon, and are being developed by Blue Origin, along with other companies like Boeing, Draper and Lockheed Martin.
The articles contained images of the lander, which matched the lander in the viral video.
Also Read:Animation Video Peddled As NASA Releasing Footage Of Chandrayaan-3
One of the search results was a document by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) providing Lightweight Surface Manipulation System overview for Blue Origin landers.
We compared the image of the Blue Moon lander from the NASA document, and found it to be an exact match with the lander in the viral video (see comparison below).
Left: Image of the lander in the viral video; Right: Image of the Blue Moon lander in the NASA document
Taking cue from this, we did a Google search with the keywords "animated video Blue Moon landing", and came across a YouTube video titled, "Meet 'Blue Moon' - Blue Origin's Lunar Lander Animated", uploaded on May 10, 2019.
Looking through the video, we found that the viral video has been made by extracting several clips from this animated video.
We also found the exact same video uploaded on the official YouTube channel of Blue Origin.
