(ORDO NEWS) — The mysterious Moon Cube is no longer a mystery. Big discovery: This is a stone that doesn’t even have a cube shape.
The Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 detected what looked like a gray cube looming on the lunar horizon in early December.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) called it a “mystery hut,” playfully suggesting that the cube could be an alien home or spacecraft.
According to CNSA estimates, the object was about 80 meters from Yutu-2, according to the blog “Our Space”, which is associated with the agency, and was preparing to send a lunar rover towards it.
The blog states that it will take two or three months to reach the cube.
After several weeks of preparation and driving, the rover is close enough to see that the “mysterious stone” is just a rock. Its crisp, geometric look on the horizon was a simple trick of perspective, light and shadow.
In an updated post posted on Friday, Our Space provided the last photo of its target taken by the rover below.
One of the ground controllers noted in his blog that the stone is shaped like a rabbit, and in front of it are smaller stones that resemble carrots. The name of the rover, Yutu, means “Jade Rabbit” – this is how the rock is now called.
Yutu-2 reached the moon in January 2019 when the Chang’e-4 lander landed on the lunar surface and rolled out the ramp to launch the rover. This was the first mission to land on the dark side of the moon.
In the three years since then, Utu-2 has traveled over 1,000 meters, used ground penetrating radar to locate a surprisingly deep layer of lunar soil, and identified rocks from the lunar mantle beneath the crust that were pushed to the surface.
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