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| - Fact Check: These astronauts DIDN'T remove their helmets on the Moon - This photo was taken on Earth
The photo implies that the Moon Landing was fake, as there is no air on the Moon to breathe. But it's not from the Moon at all.
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India Today Fact Check
The photo was clicked during a training session at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, and not on the Moon.
More than five decades since humans first set foot on the Moon, conspiracy theories about it being faked — created in a studio — still continue to follow this historic achievement. Over the years, people have presented a plethora of questionable evidence to bolster this claim.
One such piece of “evidence” that's been widely shared recently is a picture of three men in spacesuits without their helmets on what appears to be the lunar surface. One of them can be seen sitting in a Lunar Roving vehicle that’s used to traverse the lunar surface. At the bottom of the picture, the text reads, "So these guys on the Moon took a moment to take their helmets off this picture."
The text implies, as usual, that the moon landing was fake because no one would be able to survive on the Moon without a helmet. The archived version of the tweet can be seen here.
India Today’s probe found that the viral image is of Apollo 16 astronauts. It was clicked by Charles M Duke Jr during a training exercise in a space centre in Florida. It isn’t from the Moon.
Earth, not Moon
We performed a reverse image search and found the viral picture on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) official account on the photo-sharing website Flickr.
The description of the photo reads, “Apollo 16 astronauts (left to right), Lunar Module Pilot Charles M Duke, Commander John W Young, and Command Module Pilot Thomas K Mattingly II during a training exercise in preparation for the Lunar Landing Mission. Date: February 6, 1972.”
The photo was clicked almost a month before the mission was launched.
We also found the viral image on Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of the free-use image, sound, and other media files. The website states that the image was catalogued by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. On further probe, we found another photo from the training exercise at the Kennedy Space Center, which is located on Merritt Island, Florida.
The US launched Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, the first space mission to put people on the moon. Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon, almost three years before this photo was taken.
Thus, it’s clear the photo is being used out of context. It was taken at a US space centre in Florida and not on the moon.
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