The off-road vehicle with which China has been exploring the Moon for several years, dubbed Yutu 2, has discovered a mysterious cube-shaped object on its way that has sparked various theories about its origin among Internet users.
The object was located in November on the other side of the Von Karman crater, on the far side of the Moon, during the 36th lunar day of the Chinese expedition - each lunar day corresponds to 29 Earth days - and about 260 feet to the horizon, according to the specialized medium Space.com.
Chinese scientists have pointed out that it could be shaped like a hut, according to Our Space, a Chinese-language science outreach channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
Faced with great anticipation for the discovery, a team of scientists said they would spend the next two to three months identifying the object, traversing the lunar terrain and avoiding craters in order to get a clearer view.
Social networks have gone crazy trying to find an explanation for this unusual formation, and taking into account that the Moon is uninhabited and there have never been signs of life.
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Everything points to the fact that the mystery is easy to solve because it would be a rock, according to Philip Stooke, professor emeritus and associate researcher at the Department of Geography and the Institute for the Exploration of Earth and Space at the University of Western Ontario .
"The Chinese media are very eager to find all kinds of strange things on the Moon," he explained to Space.com.
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But "there are many things that make every story a sensational headline: alien bases, millions of tons of precious metals or unspecified substances, conspiracies about Western interests in space and everything in between," he noted.
"So it comes as no surprise to me that a rock that appears more or less square in low-resolution images is interpreted as a cabin or some other type of building," Stooke said.
"Scientifically, the rock could be interesting, and I hope that it or the nearby rocks on the crater rim will be studied in detail when [the researchers] arrive in early 2022. But it will not look like a cabin," he said.
