Viral Video of ISRO’s Mangalyaan ‘Landing on Mars’ is Clearly Fake

An animated video purportedly showing ISRO’s Mangalyaan landing on Mars has gone viral on social media.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

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THE CLAIM

A video of a spacecraft’s journey from liftoff on Earth to landing on what appears to be the planet Mars has been doing the rounds on social media.

A Facebook page Jai Ho claims that the animated video shows the “beautiful” landing of Mangalyaan on Mars – Indian Space Research Organisation’s Mars Orbiter Mission, that was launched on 5 November 2013.

The video was also shared by several known fake news peddling Facebook groups like We Support Nationalism and दैनिक अम्बर.

The video was shared with the caption “मंगलयान की बहुत ही खूबसूरत लैंडिंग अंत तक देखे (Mangalyaan’s beautiful landing... watch till the end).”

It had been viewed almost 37,000 times and shared more than 230 times in just two hours at the time of writing this piece.

THE TRUTH

The video does not show the Mangalyaan, as claimed in the viral post. This can be ascertained easily:

• The simplest and most logical reason is that Mangalyaan is a Mars Orbiter Mission. Hence, as the name suggests, its mission is to orbit Mars and not land on it.
• In the audio commentary encoded along with the video, it can be clearly heard that the spacecraft is the “Delta-II rocket carrying the Mars Exploration Rover made by NASA”.
• US Air Force (USAF), JCI and Delta can be seen in the video written on the tower supporting the rocket before liftoff.
• The latter half of the video actually shows the Mars rover in action. The Mangalyaan, currently in orbit around Mars, is not carrying any such equipment on-board.

ORIGIN OF THE VIDEO

A reverse image search of a key frame of the video revealed that the video was made by Maas Digital, a digital animation company, for Cornell University and NASA/JPL in 2003.

Screenshot of the reverse image search of a key frame from the viral video.(Photo: The Quint)

The original video shows a detailed flight trajectory and mission plan of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, that involved sending two robotic Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to explore the planet Mars in 2003.

Here is the original video:

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