NASA Twitter Account Hacked; Posts Racy Pic Of Woman's Butt
(CBS SF) -- The Twitter account belonging to NASA's Kepler space telescope was hacked on Wednesday, with the feed briefly showing a racy photo before it was taken down.
The Kepler space observatory, launched in 2009, is on a mission to search for Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars in a portion of the Milky Way galaxy.
A tweet from the @NASAKepler account Wednesday morning briefly displayed a close-up image of a woman's buttocks wearing sexy lingerie underwear. The text accompanying the image read, "Waitin for ya:" along with a heart emoji and a link to a pornographic website.
Our account was temporarily compromised. We're back in business, ready to tell you about new planet discoveries.
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) July 6, 2016
The tweet was up for 16 minutes before it was taken down, according to Post Ghost, an archive of deleted tweets from verified Twitter accounts.
NASA then sent out a tweet saying, "Our account was temporarily compromised. We're back in business, ready to tell you about new planet discoveries.
Of course, Twitter users were not going to let the incident go without a cheeky response.
Carlos E. Castañeda is Senior Editor, News & Social Media for CBS San Francisco and a San Francisco native. You can follow him on Twitter or send him an email.