Chinese Rover took this picture a few days ago. It shows a strange monolith shaped object on the horizon. The Chinese space bods have named it “mystery hut” but what is it really?

China’s Yutu-2 rover landed on the dark side of the moon in 2019. Its called the dark side of the moon not because its dark but because we can’t see it. This side of the moon is always facing away from Earth. The first time earthlings got a glimpse of the moon’s ‘dark’ face was in the 60’s when NASA sent the lunar orbiter round the moon’s far side. The Apollo crew saw the lunar surface was potmarked with impact craters, far more than on the side of the moon we can see. The Nasa guys didn’t spot this protruding rectangular block though.

NASA lunar reconnaissance orbiter has pictured the rover and the object from above. The black arrow points to the location of the object and the white square is where the Yutu-2 rover landed

The object is 80m from where the Yutu-2. By my calculations (done by using a ruler on an image above!) the object is a few meters tall.

There have been lots of suggestions about what the ‘hut’ could be but we’ll have to wait for the rover to get closer to find out. Annoyingly that could take months as the rover travels at a literal snail’s pace (about 3-4meters per hour) and when the dark side of the moon goes dark (lunar nights last 2 weeks btw!) then she has to stop bc she’s solar powered.

Most likely the ‘mysterious hut’ will have to be renamed ‘unmysterious debris from an asteroid strike’…. but maybe , just maybe it’ll be something really cool!