Yutu-2’s “mystery hut”

The 'mystery hut' was a strange, box-shaped object that China's Yutu-2 rover spotted on the far side of the Moon in late 2021. In a photo taken from about 80 m away, it looked like a little cube or cabin sitting on the horizon. When the Chinese space agency's outreach channel, Our Space, shared the picture in December 2021, people all over the world began guessing what it could be.

Yutu-2 changed course and drove for about a month to get a closer look. In January 2022 the answer arrived: it was just a rock, much smaller than it had seemed from far away. But the rock had a funny shape. It looked like a crouching rabbit, with smaller stones in front of it like carrots. That made the story even better, because the rover's own name, Yutu, means 'Jade Rabbit'.

The rover

Yutu-2 landed with China's Chang'e 4 lander on 3 January 2019 in Von Kármán crater, inside the giant South Pole–Aitken basin. It was the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon's far side. The rover weighs about 140 kg and has driven a little over 1.6 km. In November 2019 it became the longest-working rover ever on the Moon, beating the old record held by the Soviet Lunokhod 1.

The mystery

The first picture showed only a small, blocky shape on the horizon, and with nothing familiar nearby to compare it with, its size was hard to judge. Our Space joked that the object, which had seemed 'as tall as the Arc de Triomphe', turned out to be very short up close. Space journalist Andrew Jones pointed out that the Moon is covered in rocks, so it would have been astonishing for it to be anything else.

The legend vs the facts

In Chinese folk tales, a Jade Rabbit lives on the Moon with the goddess Chang'e and pounds the elixir of life for her. In Korea and Japan, people tell of a Moon rabbit pounding rice cakes. China named its rovers Yutu after this rabbit, and the landers after Chang'e. The rabbit-shaped rock was not a sign of anything magical, of course: the Moon is covered with millions of rocks, and one of them simply happened to look like a rabbit.

On the 3D Moon

On the 3D Moon this hidden find is on the far side near the Chang'e 4 landing site, where Yutu-2 found that its 'mystery hut' was really a rabbit-shaped rock.