Eleven years ago, on this day in history, Chandrayaan-I India's first unmanned mission was launched by ISRO from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. On October 22 2008, 11, the spacecraft was launched using India's Polar satellite launch vehicle PSLV-C11, was operational for 312 days made at least 3,400 orbits around the moon until August 29, 2009.
Though the Mangalyaan launch took place during the UPA regime (November 2013), the spacecraft reached the Mars orbit during the Narendra Modi government (September 2014), Nair noted.
The Chandrayaan-I mission took place during the UPA regime with Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister. To acknowledge this milestone, Congress decided to take a trip down the memory lane remembering this historical day by tweeting an image of Chandrayaan-I along with a caption stating, "11 years ago India & the entire team at ISRO made history by launching its first lunar mission Chandrayaan-I."
It definitely was a major throwback moment for netizens but the image depicted was not the original image of the Chandrayaan-I. The picture shared was that of the Apollo 11 mission.
Fact Check:
IBTimes India decided to run the picture of Chandrayaan-I, as claimed by the Congress, through a Google image search but Google orbited around a different narrative. It was found that the image was of a Lunar Module, which was captured in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission.
The official website of NASA documented a journal that includes exclusive pictures from it's various Apollo missions, over the years The image gallery has also archived raw footage and exclusive pictures of the moon landing from the Apollo Mission 11.
A similar image was spotted with a caption stating, "LM approaches CSM for docking/earthrise in background." According to the website, the photo was captured on July 21, 1969.
According to the Rare Historical Photos website, the spaceflight, which landed humans on the moon, contained Commander Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot. This historic picture was captured by Astronaut Micheal Collins.
Similarly, Reddit posted an image in February which states, "Astronaut Michael Collins took this photo in 1969. It is said that Michael is the only person, dead or alive to not appear in the frame of this picture."
