NASA wrongly identifies Mt Everest in India

London: NASA has admitted that it has mistaken a peak in India to be the world’s highest mountain Mount Everest, which straddles Nepal and China.

The agency said on its website that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko’s snap from the International Space Station, 230 miles above Earth, showed Everest lightly dusted with snow. The picture spread rapidly via Twitter and was picked up by media around the world, the Telegraph reports. But Nepalis voiced their suspicions on social media. "Sorry guys, but the tall peak with the shadow in the middle is not Mt Everest," Journalist Kunda Dixit, an authority on the Himalayas, tweeted. NASA confirmed on Thursday that it had made a mistake and removed the picture from its website, the report said. "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 an international news agency. "The view is in midafternoon light looking northeastward," he added. According to the report, he did not explain how the picture from the space station, a joint project of the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe, had been wrongly identified. ANI