The American space agency NASA has admitted it mistook a summit in India for Mount Everest.
The agency had said on its website that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko’s photo from the International Space Station, 370 kilometres above Earth, showed Everest lightly dusted with snow.
The picture had spread rapidly via Twitter and was picked up by media around the world, including the US-based magazine The Atlantic, astronomy website Space.com and US cable news channel MSNBC.
But a Nepali expert on the Himalayas was not convinced. Journalist Kunda Dixit had tweeted: “Sorry guys, but the tall peak with the shadow in the middle is not Mount Everest.”
NASA confirmed on Thursday that it had made a mistake and removed the picture from its website, AFP reported.
“It is not Everest. It is Saser Muztagh, in the Karakoram Range of the Kashmir region of India,” a spokesman admitted in an email to AFP. nepalnews.