Does footage of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's first flight actually show the desert landscape of Algeria and not Mars in the background? No, that's not true: Footage of the takeoff and landing of NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, posted on YouTube by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, does not show the same scenery as pictured in an Instagram post. The real footage shows Mars, while the Instagram post shows an image of the rock "city of Sifar" in southern Algeria. That image has been edited to look like a Mars rover hoax.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Instagram by astrolog_taro_lyubima on September 3, 2024. It was captioned with the hashtags:
#usa#miami#texas#austin#spacex#nasa#nyc#russia#mars#history#space
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Thu Sep 12 14:17:12 2024 UTC)
The post had five seconds of the music of the Pink Panther Theme, but there was no moving image or voice narration. Text on the paired images said:
MARS
First flight on Mars 17 Apr 2021. By: Ingenuity Helicopter
ALGERIA
🤔
This could be considered a "Straw Man Argument," where an opponent's position is misrepresented in order to argue against it easily. This Instagram post is essentially a self-fact check of a self-made false claim. The bottom photo in the post is indeed Algeria, but the top photo is not Mars -- it's an edited version of the Algerian photo. NASA never misrepresented images of Algeria as Mars.
The screenshot below shows the landscape of Mars in a video on YouTube titled, "First Video of NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight, Includes Takeoff and Landing (High-Res)." It was posted by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on its YouTube account on April 19, 2021.
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Thu Sep 12 17:17:57 2024 UTC)
The NASA website has a section dedicated to the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter -- no images on the page resemble the Algerian desert landscape pictured in the Instagram post. The page includes a timeline of highlights in the three-year-long mission.
A GIF shows the helicopter as it was deployed over the days from March 26, 2021, to April 3, 2021. Shot from NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, there is a video of the first flight on April 19, 2021, and several additional highlights with distance and altitude records, continuing until the January 25, 2024, announcement that the mission was ended after the discovery of a damaged rotor blade. All of the photos and videos show the landscape of Mars and not the edited image of the Algerian desert made to include the Perseverance Mars rover and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.
A reverse image search of the top image in the post on Instagram (below right) returned several results showing the rocky and sandy desert landscape. One (pictured below with the ALGERIA title) was featured as the thumbnail image (archived here) of a nearly 12-hour-long HD video of Algerian scenes on YouTube. Another photo (below bottom) showed the same rock features from a slightly different angle in a slideshow (archived here) on the website of a tour company. The company identified the region as Tadrart Acacus, Algeria, describing it as:
ALGERIA
Tadrart Acacus
In its extreme south, the rocky plateau of the Tassili n'Ajjer breaks up into isolated sandstone reliefs: a concentration of rocky sculptures and cathedrals, set in the sumptuous red and yellow dunes of the ergs of Tin Merzouga, Mulinaga, In Zawaten, In Tehak.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image with YouTube, Instagram and spazidavventura.com screenshots taken on Thu Sep 12 19:43:51 2024 UTC)
At the time this fact check was written, AFP Fact Check had reviewed the same claim.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks of claims about NASA and Mars can be found here and here.
