<p>The world's highest mountain should not be hard to spot but American space agency NASA has admitted it mistook a summit in India for Mount Everest, which straddles the border of Nepal and China.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The agency said on its website that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko's snap from the International Space Station, 370 kilometres above Earth, showed Everest lightly dusted with snow.<br /><br />The picture 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.<br /><br />But Nepalis smelt a rat and voiced their suspicions on social media. Journalist Kunda Dixit, an authority on the Himalayas, tweeted: "Sorry guys, but the tall peak with the shadow in the middle is not Mt Everest."<br /><br />NASA confirmed on Thursday that it had made a mistake and removed the picture from its website.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />"The view is in mid-afternoon light looking northeastward."<br />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.<br /><br />Everest, which is 8,848 metres (29,028 feet) high, is an sought-after photographic target for astronauts in orbit but is tricky to capture, according to astronaut Ron Garan, who lived on the International Space Station last year.<br /><br />"No time is allotted in our work day normally for Earth pictures. So if we want to capture a specific point on the ground we have to first know exactly when we will fly over that spot," he told The Atlantic.</p>
<p>The world's highest mountain should not be hard to spot but American space agency NASA has admitted it mistook a summit in India for Mount Everest, which straddles the border of Nepal and China.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The agency said on its website that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko's snap from the International Space Station, 370 kilometres above Earth, showed Everest lightly dusted with snow.<br /><br />The picture 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.<br /><br />But Nepalis smelt a rat and voiced their suspicions on social media. Journalist Kunda Dixit, an authority on the Himalayas, tweeted: "Sorry guys, but the tall peak with the shadow in the middle is not Mt Everest."<br /><br />NASA confirmed on Thursday that it had made a mistake and removed the picture from its website.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />"The view is in mid-afternoon light looking northeastward."<br />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.<br /><br />Everest, which is 8,848 metres (29,028 feet) high, is an sought-after photographic target for astronauts in orbit but is tricky to capture, according to astronaut Ron Garan, who lived on the International Space Station last year.<br /><br />"No time is allotted in our work day normally for Earth pictures. So if we want to capture a specific point on the ground we have to first know exactly when we will fly over that spot," he told The Atlantic.</p>