NASA has faked images of Mars by taking pictures of locations on earth and tinting them red.
False. The images in the post have never been released by NASA. They depict a location in Ireland that featured in a satirical video on how to fake photographs.
A Facebook post which claims that the Mars landings are being faked and that NASA is a hoax is false.
The post contains two side by side images of what appears to be an identical, remote location. The first image depicts a barren area of grass and rocks while the second has a red tint and features a small section of a Martian rover in the bottom left-hand corner.
The post says: “Mars looks exactly like Arizona, Nevada or parts of the Australian outback desert and it appears NASA simply added a red tint to the atmosphere in post-production. By using the “AutoLevels Tool” in Photoshop, official NASA Mars photographs lose their red tint, however, and look exactly like the Earth.
“NASA has already admitted to carrying out simulations at Devon Island. It’s worth noting that Devon Island is “the largest uninhabited isle on Earth,” which seems to be a perfect location for an imitation Martian photograph shoot.”
A caption on the photograph says: “Mars landings are already being faked” and that “NASA is a hoax”.
While it is true that NASA has conducted simulated explorations of the Martian landscape at Devon Island in Canada, the image in the post is not taken from this location and is not an official NASA photograph as claimed.
Instead, both images depict an area in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland known as the Burren, as shown in this public domain picture which was found through a reverse image search. In the Facebook post, the image on the right has been tinted red and a small section of a Mars rover added.
The images come from a satirical video on YouTube called “NASA Training Session Mars Photography Workshop 101”, in which the creator pretends to run a session for NASA staff on how to fake photographs.
The added section of a Mars rover appears to have been taken from this NASA image of the Spirit Rover which landed at the Gusev Crater on Mars in January 2004.
Image courtesy of Nicolas Lobos
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the image has not been released by NASA and features a scene from Earth which has been coloured to make it look like Mars.
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