NASA knows the importance of getting every detail right. That's why it was so surprising to see them pass along bad information about the San Diego County wildfires in a post that shared a stunning satellite image of smoke from this week's firestorm.

The text below the amazing photo (all that smoke! visible from space!) begins like so:

What's wrong? It's not accurate, at least yet, to say arson is suspected as the origin of these fires because it is merely one of many possibilities that investigators are pursuing. Also, those teens? Police arrested them for allegedly trying to start two brushfires Thursday but have not connected them to the major wildfires ravaging the county.

We've alerted NASA on Twitter and will see if they respond or change a blog post likely to be seen by thousands of people. A NASA tweet containing the image and a link to its post was retweeted 373 times and favorited 188 times in an hour.

About the picture? NASA reports its Aqua satellite collected the "natural-color" image with a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Thursday. Actively burning areas, detected by MODISs thermal bands, are outlined in red.

It credits Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC, with the image and Lynn Jenner with writing the caption, based on information from CNN.com, San Diego CBS affliate Channel 8, and San Diego ABC affliate Channel 10.

Your photo's great, NASA. But you're too big an agency to post incorrect information that can get recirculated so widely.

See also:

Prospect of arson stokes fear, suspicion in San Diego

Watch time-lapse video of Cocos Fire's gathering strength

Originally posted here:

NASA shares good photo, bad facts about San Diego wildfires