Moon's 'mystery hut' spotted by Chinese rover nothing but a rock, claims scientist

The case of the ‘mystery hut’, which was spotted by Chinese lunar rover Yutu 2 a few days ago seems to have been solved. The rover, which landed on the Moon in January 2019 under China’s Chang'e-4 mission, sent a picture from the lunar surface of what seemed like a square-shaped outcrop on the far side of the Moon. However, this supposed myth has been busted by Philip Stooke, a professor of geography and space exploration at the University of Western Ontario who says that the structure is nothing but a rock. 

"Chinese media are very eager to find all sorts of strange things on the moon. We tend to think they are all tightly controlled and just repeat the party line, but there is a ton of stuff spinning every news item into a sensational headline … alien bases, millions of tons of priceless metals or unspecified substances, conspiracies about western interests in space and everything else", Stooke said as per Space.com. With the new being nothing more than a clickbait, Stooke added that he is not surprised by the presentation of a rock as a hut, due to the low-resolution of images. "Scientifically, the rock could be interesting, and I expect it or nearby rocks on the crater rim to be studied in detail when they reach it early in 2022. But it won't look like a hut", Space.com reported him saying.

A misleading discovery...

It was on December 5 when the Yutu 2 rover spotted the supposedly 'mystery hut' some 80 metres away from it on the 36th day of its mission. The image of the outcrop was shared by Our Space, a science-oriented Chinese channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and soon turned out to be a center of interest for the scientific community. At the time of the discovery, the rover was at the Von Kármán crater and has currently moved on to investigate the object spotted a few yards away.  Interestingly, similar peculiar stuff has been claimed to be discovered on the Moon by China. Previously, the rover reportedly discovered a gel-like substance back in 2019, which actually was a mix of lunar rock and glass that resulted from an impact.