No, This Isn't The First Picture From The Mars Curiosity Rover
The NASA rover Curiosity landed on Mars early this morning. Now this picture of a sunset on Mars is going viral on Tumblr and Twitter and all the hot sharing apparatuses, along with the caption: "NASA just landed a rover on Mars, this is the very first picture. This JUST happened minutes ago."
This is a lie. While the picture above is of Mars, it was in fact taken by the Mars Spirit rover in 2005.
Here's the first photo taken by the Curosity on Mars: It's just a wheel.
But the fake photo is now as popular on Tumblr as a shirtless picture of Tyler, The Creator, with over 17,000 notes. Animated .gif-addled Tumblr users have a history of passing around misleading, out-of-context news photos: Just last week a photo went viral of a female Palestinian runner in a headscarf supposedly beating a bunch of scantily-clad runners. She was actually being lapped. A good rule of thumb: Never believe a photo if its source is Tumblr.
Stop sharing the fake photo. You're hurting Curiosity's feelings.