#yutu-2

Do you remember the "mystery hut"? well neither did I but Yutu-2 has been driving towards it the last few lunar days and finally got close enough for this shocking reveal;

in a depression on the 

dark side of the moon. 

The first mission to the farside of the moon may have found bits of the moon’s interior on its surface.

The Yutu-2 rover, deployed by the Chinese Chang’e-4 spacecraft that landed on the moon in January, detected soil that appears rich in minerals thought to make up the lunar mantle, researchers report in the May 16 Nature. Those origins, if confirmed, could offer insight into the moon’s early development.

“Understanding the composition of the lunar mantle is key to determining how the moon formed and evolved,” says Mark Wieczorek, a geophysicist at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, not involved in the work. “We do not have any clear, unaltered samples of the lunar mantle” from past moon missions.

In hopes of finding mantle samples, Chang’e-4 touched down in the moon’s largest impact basin, the South Pole–Aitken basin (SN: 2/2/19, p. 5). The collision that formed this enormous divot is thought to have been powerful enough to punch through the moon’s crust and expose mantle rocks to the lunar surface (SN: 11/24/18, p. 14). During its first lunar day on the moon, Yutu-2 recorded the spectra of light reflected off lunar soil at two spots using its Visible and Near-Infrared Spectrometer.

When researchers analyzed these spectra, “what we saw was quite different” than normal lunar surface material, says study coauthor Dawei Liu, a planetary scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.

YUTU-2 ON DUTY The Chang’e-4 mission’s Yutu-2 rover (shown) recorded the spectra of light reflected off the lunar surface in the South Pole–Aitken basin, which contain clues about the minerals that make up the soil. CREDIT: CHINESE NATIONAL SPACE ADMINISTRATION

Yutu-2’s spectra revealed soil dominated by olivine and low-calcium pyroxene, which are thought to be ingredients in the lunar mantle. One site appeared to contain about 48 percent olivine and 42 percent low-calcium pyroxene; only 10 percent was a component of the lunar crust called high-calcium pyroxene. The other site showed 55 percent olivine, 38 percent low-calcium pyroxene and a mere 7 percent high-calcium pyroxene.

Mysterious cubic structure discovered on the far side of the Moon

Last November, the Chinese rover Yutu-2 spotted a mysterious cubic-shaped structure, according to recently shared information. A mysterious structure whose shape resembles that of a “hut” according to the first descriptions. At the moment, we don’t know much about this mysterious structure. Nonetheless, researchers believe it could have been a large boulder excavated by an impact. Image by avesy…