NASA Kepler Spacecraft Tweets Image of a Woman's Derriere

A photograph of a woman's face and red panty-clad bottom briefly appeared on the official Twitter account for NASA's Kepler, a mission surveying parts of the Milky Way Galaxy for hospitable planets.

The defacement was visible the morning of July 6. It is unclear how the hacker broached NASA's social media account.

"Unfortunately for NASA, the tweet also shows up in the mission website," Gizmodo reported.

Around 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, the unauthorized user, who changed Kepler's name on Twitter to r4die2oz, posted the butt photo with the caption "waiting for ya: <3," followed by a link to a porn site, localsex2.com, according to Motherboard. 

The account was restored around 10:45 a.m. Eastern the same day. 

"As you may have seen, we recovered the account and are back in business," NASA's social media manager John Yembrick said in an email to Motherboard. "We’re investigating the cause of this incident with Twitter. We have hundreds of official NASA Twitter accounts, and this is a very rare occurrence. We work to safeguard our accounts as much as possible. Although we monitor all of our accounts closely, we want to thank our followers for flagging the incident for us."