You know China sent a rover to the Moon, right? The mission is called Chang’e 4, and the rover is named Yutu 2. And it’s sitting on the far or dark side of the moon right now and has been since January 3, 2019. It is sending images back to earth, and one, in particular, looks strange. Or, maybe it’s more intriguing? 

What is the “mysterious hut” seen on the Moon?

China calls it a “mysterious hut,” because that is what it looks like. It is too square to be a rock, but that is what many think it is. If you’ve watched too much sci-fi, it looks like a hut to house aliens after crashing to the Moon. 

It’s sitting in the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin. And the six-wheeled Yutu 2 is headed for it. Our Space wrote mission controllers observed “an obtrusive cube on the northern skyline that attracted their attention.” It postulates whether it might be a “pioneer spacecraft of predecessors to explore the Moon.”

“Excavated by impacts” on the Moon

Could it be some of the Moon’s surface “excavated by impacts?” That is what Andrew Jone, who covers China’s space program, tweeted. Sometimes large boulders get pushed up to the surface from impacts according to him. It’s just that it is so cube-like. It doesn’t look like a rock or boulder. 

Could the image be an artifact?

Maybe it is just a visual artifact. With digital images, sometimes these artifacts appear. Sometimes pixelization can randomly create these artifacts. Especially highlighted against a black sky, it is the type of thing that could happen. So, maybe it is nothing. 

Gizmondo tells of a green, glistening gel-like substance observed by Yutu 2 in September 2019. It ended up being Rock fragments fused together from extreme heat, probably from an impact, is what it end. Then this year it uncovered spikey objects sticking out of the Moon’s surface. Those ended up being rocks shoveled out by an impact. 

So far, two out of two mysterious objects caught by the rover have turned out to rock. And let’s be clear, the entire surface of the Moon is most assuredly dirt and rock. Really, there can be nothing else. 

We won’t know for two or three months what the “hut” is

As for the hut, Yutu 2 is headed for it. It is about 260 feet from where the rover is now. The speed at which the rover travels means it won’t reach the hut for over two months. Nothing happens quickly on the Moon. 

Though we know what to expect once the rover gets to the hut’s location, you know what we hope for? That it is indeed something created by intelligent life. Can you imagine how we Earthlings would react? We would lose our minds, in a good way. 

With the pandemic making 2020 and 2021 so dreary, humans need something like discovering alien life, to perk things up. It could turn 2022 into something incredibly uplifting in this time of Delta, Omicron, and the invasion of Ukraine.