No, this image of Earth isn’t from an Elon Musk/NASA leak

An image of what looks like Earth, if it were rolled flat, is being shared on social media with a surprising description. 

"Data leak at Elon Musk AND NASA — this photo and another eleven photos are said to be from one of Elon Musk’s Space-X satellites," the post says. "These photos were not encrypted during transmission. NASA hackers would have intercepted them."

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

We reached out to both NASA and SpaceX, the rocket company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, but didn’t hear back. 

However, we found no evidence to support the claim that this image was made public as a result of a leak at the federal agency or Musk’s private company. Previous authenticated leaks, such as video of a SpaceX rocket exploding in 2019 and an email from Musk warning SpaceX faced bankruptcy in 2021, were both well-covered in the media. It follows that news organizations would also cover the alleged leak of this image, but we found no such reports. 

The image itself has been online for years, and previously, it wasn’t connected to NASA, SpaceX or Elon Musk.

Featured Fact-check

Threads posts

stated on October 11, 2024 in a Threads post

The northern lights are proof of the sky “glowing with chemicals” sprayed in the sky.

It appeared in this 2018 tweet, this January Quora post, this 2020 blog post claiming the earth is flat, and this undated blog post musing that the earth is neither flat nor a sphere. 

This NASA image, created by combining data from two satellites, shows what Earth looks like from space. It is well-established that the Earth is a sphere — more specifically, an irregularly shaped ellipsoid, according to the National Ocean Service — and it does not look like the image in the Facebook post. 

We rate this post False.