Last November, the Chinese Yutu-2 lunar rover spotted something curious on the far side of the moon. The image was blurry, but it was unmistakable: the object looked like a cube sitting on the moon’s surface. The shape seemed too precise to be just a moon rock — perhaps something left behind by visiting aliens, like the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
The Chinese space authorities called it the “mysterious hut.” Others called it the “moon cube.” Yutu-2 was sent for a closer look, and with the calm speed the rover can travel, it took weeks to get close.
On Friday, Our Space, a Chinese linguistics channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration, posted an update. There is no monolith, no secret base on the rim of a lunar crater. Up close it turns out to be just a rock. The seemingly perfect geometric shape was just a trick of angle, light and shadow.
Although the mysterious hut wasn’t a hut at all, one of the rover’s remote drivers on Earth pointed out that the rock looked a bit like a rabbit and that one of the stones in front of it looked a bit like a carrot. That’s fitting, because the robber’s name means ‘Jade Rabbit’.
The rover has now traveled just over 1,000 meters since arriving on the far side of the moon three years ago at Von Kármán Crater as part of the Chang’e-4 mission. It is the first mission to land on the other side.
Visual illusions are common in the history of space exploration, whether seen by astronomers peering through telescopes on Earth or by robotic explorers on other worlds capturing images with cameras. In parallel with the rabbit-like rock found by the Chinese rover, a NASA rover on Mars, Opportunity, spotted something that resembled rabbit ears in 2004. Further analysis by engineers on Earth suggested it was insulation or other soft material from the rover itself.
