NASA misplaced Everest on India

The NASA aerospace agency has made a confusing mistake by placing the Everest peak in India, while in fact the world's highest mountain is located on the border of Nepal and China.

On its home page, NASA said the photo was taken by the Russian astronaut Yuri Malenchenko from the International Space Station ISS, 370 km from Earth, showing that Mount Everest has a bright silver color due to snow.

This photo has been shared a lot on Twitter and used by many press agencies, including The Atlantic in the US, or Space.com's aerospace and MSNBC cable channel.

Mount Everest taken from the universe

However, Nepalese people have doubted about this picture. Journalist Kunda Dixit wrote on Twitter: " Sorry everyone, that white dot is not Mount Everest".

On December 13, NASA confirmed that it had made a mistake and unloaded the image from its home page.

'It's not Everest, it's Saser Muztagh, located in the Karakoram strip of Kashmir in India ,' a NASA spokesperson told AFP via email.

However, he did not explain why the picture taken from the space station was so wrongly positioned.

Currently on ISS there are scientists from the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe working.

Mount Everest, 8,848 meters high, is often the target of astronauts when taking photos from the universe. But according to astronaut Ron Garan, who was in ISS last year, taking photos of this peak is quite difficult.

'If we want to target a specific point, we must first know its exact location when it passes by ,' Garan told The Atlantic.