NASA goofs up

The US space agency NASA has admitted it mistook a mountain in India for Mount Everest when it posted online a picture taken from space.

NASA initially said the photograph taken by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko showed the world’s tallest summit.

The image was picked up by a number of media outlets, but NASA removed it after a Nepalese expert spotted the error. “It is not Everest. It is Saser Muztagh in the Karakoram Range of the Kashmir region,” a NASA spokesperson told BBC. The spokesperson, however, did not explain how the photograph from the space station had been wrongly identified.