moon – Adverbly

China’s Yutu-2 (“Jade Rabbit”) moon rover, the first to land on the far side of the moon, has been exploring the lunar surface since 2018. To date, the rover has been used to study the moon’s composition and interior structure. Now, it has been dispatched on a curious side quest: investigating a strange object spotted in the distance.

**The mysterious “moon cube” spotted by China’s Yutu-2 moon rover.**

From Smithsonian Magazine:

An intriguing cube-shaped object spotted on the far side of the moon has attracted the attention of scientists.

China’s Yutu 2 rover captured images of the mystery structure from around 260 feet away while navigating across the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon, reports Popular Science’s Margo Milanowski. Chinese scientists have already rerouted the rover to take a closer look, but it will take a few months for Yutu 2 to reach the bizarre lunar feature.

The shape was spotted on the horizon in November during the mission’s 36th lunar day, according to a Yutu 2 diary published by Our Space, a Chinese language science outreach channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration. Our Space first described the object in a post last week, temporarily dubbing it a “mystery hut” (神秘小屋/shenmi xiaowu).

Mysterious indeed. Of course, as Inverse reports, the object in question is almost certainly just a boulder.

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is notably the only known extraterrestrial body where surface liquid exists. In its case, the liquid is not water but rather liquid methane. Titan hasn’t just got a few puddles here and there, either: it has veritable seas of liquid methane covering large parts of its surface. And at a balmy -180 degrees Celsius, they make for the perfect beach vacation!

Recently, scientists have been puzzled by th

Radar image of the Titan surface taken on 22. July 2006 from Cassini probe. We can see liquid lakes of methane in this picture. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

e appearance of a large object in one of Titan’s methane lakes:

They spotted the object in an image taken by Nasa’s Cassini probe last year as it swung around the alien moon, more than a billion kilometres from Earth. Pictures of the same spot captured nothing before or some days later.

Little more than a white blob on a grainy image of Titan’s northern hemisphere, the sighting could be an iceberg that broke free of the shoreline, an effect of rising bubbles, or waves rolling across the normally placid lake’s surface, scientists say.

Astronomers have named the blob the “magic island” until they have a better idea what they are looking at.