‘Photo from Artemis II’ of moon crater with Earth in background is fake

An image appearing to show a huge crater on the moon with the Earth in the background is being shared with claims it was photographed as part of the Artemis II mission.

But this widely-shared image is fake, and has almost certainly been generated with artificial intelligence.

The picture, which has gained thousands of interactions across Facebook, at first appears to have been taken from a window in the Orion spacecraft.

Captions on posts sharing the image claim that it depicts the “Orientale Basin”, adding: “For the first time in human history, the full scale of the moon’s Orientale Basin has been witnessed by human eyes. Astronauts aboard the Artemis II mission captured this breathtaking view from the Orion spacecraft, marking a monumental milestone in deep-space exploration.”

It is correct that the crew aboard the Artemis II lunar fly-by mission was able to photograph the Orientale Basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide impact crater that straddles the moon’s near and far sides. According to NASA, the Orion crew “are the first people to ever see the full” basin.

But this image being circulated on social media is not a real photograph from the mission.

There are a number of clues that show it to be fake, and almost certainly generated by artificial intelligence.

Most of the examples being shared include overlaid text in the bottom-right corner saying “Science and Astro”, indicating they got it from a page with that name, which shared the image on 6 April in a post which gained over 23,000 shares.

But that page’s version clearly includes the diamond Gemini watermark, a strong indicator that it was made with Google’s AI tools.

The account also posted a comment on a very similar image it shared appearing to show the Orientale Basin with the Earth in the background, stating that the picture was “just updated using AI but is originally taken by NASA, the world is still the real as in the original images, just edited to avoid copyrights [sic]”.

But we found that the image does not match any real photos taken by the Artemis II crew of the Orientale basin during the lunar fly-by, which differs in its physical appearance to how it is represented in the viral picture.

Those genuine images show the entire crater from much further away.

There are genuine photos from NASA showing the moon’s surface with the Earth in the background taken by Artemis II, but these don’t resemble the one we’ve checked here.

A NASA computer modelled image of the terrain of the basin in high relief also shows clear differences with the picture being shared.

We have also fact checked another fake image purporting to have been taken on the Artemis II mission which has been gaining traction on social media.

Before sharing content like this that you see online, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and verifiable source. Our toolkit contains guides on how to check whether images might be misleading, such as tips on how to do reverse image searches.