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A special investigation mission on the dark side of the Moon

Mon 06 Dec 2021    
EcoBalance
| 2 min read

A rover that landed on the far side of the moon has been sent to investigate a peculiar object on its visible horizon.

The far side of the moon has relatively few flat areas, however, the rover noticed that this structure certainly stood out.

Considering there isn’t much on the surface of our closest celestial object, researchers were piqued by what has been described as a cube-shaped structure that was seen off in the distance.

It was estimated to be around 80 metres away from where China’s Yutu-2 rover was and could be in the Von Kármán crater.

The Chinese have a nickname for the structure, which is ‘mystery house’, and they’ve sent the rover to the region to suss it out.

The grainy image shows it’s probably not a monolith left by aliens, but we won’t know for certain until Yutu-2 gets there and has a look.

China made space history two years ago with the first-ever successful soft landing on the far side of the moon, using its Chang’e-4 lander.

The far side of the moon is the section that always faces away from Earth.

Not long after it arrived, everyone got very excited because the rover managed to discover a strange ‘gel-like substance’ with a ‘mysterious lustre.’

After being imaged in late July 2019, details of the substance were revealed on the Yutu-2 drive diary, which was published by the Chinese government-sanctioned science outreach blog Our Space.

Experts eventually confirmed it wasn’t just what the man on the moon left behind after a bad bout of hayfever.

Instead, analysis of the imagery and studies of the lunar regolith brought back by Apollo astronauts have proven that the bizarre substance is actually rock. 

But the team did give us something interesting to think about in regards to said rock.

The rock had been melded together in a huge blast of heat – possibly, scientists think, from a meteor impact.

Outlining their findings in a paper, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the team of researchers wrote: “Chang’e-4 rover discovered a dark greenish and glistening impact melt breccia in a crater during its traverse on the floor of Von Kármán crater within the South Pole Aitken (SPA) basin on the lunar farside.

“The discovered breccia, being 52 × 16 cm, resembles the lunar impact melt breccia samples 15466 and 70019 that returned by the Apollo missions. It was formed by impact-generated welding, cementing, and agglutinating of lunar regolith and breccia.”

Source: Agencies


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