Last month, China's space agency caused a stir after claiming to find a "mystery house" object on the far side of the Moon. It turned out that after being approached the mysterious object was just a stone.
The object was first captured by the Yutu-2 rover camera in early December while exploring the Von Karman crater at the Moon's South Pole. Due to blurry photos and limited viewing angles, the object looks like a hut in the shape of a cube.
Its symmetrical shape with a flat top makes the Our Space program which is part of the China National Space Administration joke that this object is a hut where alien pioneers are.
Mission control then decided to approach the object, and sent the Yutu-2 rover on a journey of 100 meters. A month later, the rover finally managed to get close to the mysterious object and send its new photo to Earth.
It turned out that the mysterious object was just a stone whose size was not so big. Uniquely, the stone looks like a rabbit looking down with two small stones in front of it that look like carrots.
By Our Space, the stone was named the 'jade rabbit'. Given that Yutu-2's name translates to jade rabbit, it looks like this rover has just found its mascot on the Moon.
According to Andrew Jones, a journalist who follows China's space program, this discovery is something that is very disappointing but also brilliant.
"The Moon's surface is made up of 38 million square kilometers of rock, so it would be astronomical for something else," Jones said in a tweet.
"But even though it's small, the jade rabbit/玉兔 stone will also be a monumental disappointment for some people," he continued.
After finding this mysterious object, Yutu-2 will continue its mission on the Moon to surround the 186 km wide Von Karman crater. The rover has been on the Moon since 2019 and was launched with the Chang'e-4 mission to examine the far side of the Moon that is not facing Earth.
The Yutu-2 relies on solar panels, so the rover will occasionally go into hibernation until it sees the sun again. Therefore, this rover takes up to a month just to travel 100 meters.
