China's Yutu 2 rover spotted a mysterious cube-shaped object, inevitably drawing comparisons to Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'. The rover spotted the object while traveling across the Von Kármán crater, a report from Space.com explains.
Yutu 2 is the first rover to explore the far side of the Moon, having landed there on Jan. 3, 2019. Since that time, it has sent back a wealth of images for the scientific community and space enthusiasts to pore over and investigate.
In November, during the Yutu 2 rover mission's 36th lunar day the machine's cameras spotted a cube-shaped object approximately 260 feet (80 meters) away on the northern horizon. The discovery was brought to our attention by Space.com, which reported on a Yutu 2 diary entry by Our Space, a Chinese language blog associated with the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The Our Space post described the cube-shaped object as a "mystery hut" (神秘小屋/shenmi xiaowu), due to its tantalizingly angular shape. It's hard not to think of the monolith in '2001: A Space Odyssey', an angular solitary machine built by an extraterrestrial species. It's worth pointing out that, though we know very little about the object, it is likely a large boulder that was unearthed by an ancient meteorite strike on the Moon. Questions do remain, however, such as how an impact could have created such a cube-shaped object, and is there any other interesting debris scattered nearby?
How can one say it "isn't aliens" when you haven't seen it up close? To read more, click here.