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Last December, a curious image of the Chinese rover Yutu 2, which explores the hidden face of the Luna from January 2019, went around the world in a matter of hours. It was a strange cube-shaped object that stood out on a completely flat horizon with no other appreciable reliefs. Jokingly, Chinese scientists themselves referred to it as a ‘mysterious cabin’, or perhaps the wreckage of a crashed ship.
Now, unsurprisingly, the mystery has been solved, and the strange object has turned out to be nothing more than a simple rock. One that, by the way, isn’t even cube-shaped. When it was first sighted, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) estimated that the object was about 80 meters away from Yutu 2.
And he made the decision to alter the planned schedule and have the rover travel that distance to observe the ‘cube’ more closely. It was not an easy maneuver and the technicians estimated that it would last between two and three months.
The reason it takes so long to cover such a short distance is in part because the rover, which is powered by solar energy, must be turned off during the lunar night, which lasts two weeks, and also when the Sun is directly overhead. him, to avoid overheating. Also, the Yutu 2 needs to travel very slowly, as the terrain it is on is dangerous, full of debris and craters.
However, the ‘moon rally’ has taken less time than planned, and after several weeks of preparations and dangerous driving, the Yutu 2 has been able to get close enough to see that the ‘mystery cabin’ was nothing more than a rock. According to experts, its geometric and regular appearance from a distance was nothing more than a simple trick of perspective, light and shadow.
From ‘cabin’ to ‘rabbit’
In his last post, published last Friday in ‘
Our Space‘, the Internet page through which the CNSA announces the news of the mission, the Chinese space agency showed the latest photographs obtained by the rover. In the same blog, one of the controllers of the Yutu 2 points out that the rock is more of a rabbit-like shape, with a series of smaller stones in front of it reminiscent of a carrot. For this reason, from now on the rock will be called Yutu, the same name as the rover, which in Chinese means’Jade rabbit‘.
Since its arrival on the Moon three years ago, Yutu 2 has already traveled more than a km in the Von Kármán crater, about 185 km in diameter. Which is much more than the three months initially planned for your mission. A time, of course, more than enough to study in depth mysterious cubes and strange ‘gel-like’ substances.
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