A post on X (formerly Twitter) with a video supposedly showing Russia’s Luna 25 crashing into the moon is FALSE.
The post reads: “BREAKING: Russia’s Luna-25 has crashed into the Moon. #Luna #Russia #MoonLanding (sic).”
The video shows a cylindrical object falling towards then crashing into what appears to be the moon’s surface and the resultant explosion.
The 15-second video has also been shared here with the same claim.
This comes after Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, announced on 19 August 2023 that it had lost communication with the Luna 25 lander. The spacecraft is believed to have crashed into the moon.
However, media reports of the incident did not include any footage of the crash, prompting an investigation into the video.
A reverse search of one of the keyframes from the footage shows that the image is of the Schrödinger Basin, a crater near the lunar South Pole where the Luna 25 would have landed had it been successful.
It also brings up recent uses of the footage with the same claim.
However, the search also brings up an article by SciTechDaily published in March 2022, which bears a GIF similar to the keyframe from the footage. According to the site, the animation is an artist’s depiction of a rocket booster crashing into the moon.
The search also brings up the footage of the moon shared by the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2018. Part of the clip (minute 2:11 to 2:19) appears to be similar to the footage under scrutiny, without the cylindrical object.
The footage has also been shared on stock footage sites such as Adobe and Alamy, where it states that the video was taken in February 2022 and is credited to yet another stock footage site, BlackBoxguild.
While PesaCheck cannot determine where the footage was first posted or who the original creator is, it is clear that the video has been online at least since February 2022.
PesaCheck has reviewed a post on X (formerly Twitter), with a video supposedly of Russia’s Luna 25 crashing into the moon, and found it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
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