It was in the bottom of a 2-meter diameter crater that Yutu-2 discovered another compelling mystery, a “dark greenish, glistening material” originally described as gel-like, which may be rock melted together by the heat of an impact. Planetary scientists believe the craters to be largely secondary impact craters from ejecta thrown from the impact that created the Zhinyu crater west of the rover’s landing site. The vast majority come in at less than 10 meters diameters. There are 88 impact craters within 50 meters of the path Yutu-2 has taken across the Moon, with an average diameter of almost 12 meters. Larger rocks like those seen at Mare Imbrium “are absent from observations.”Īt least we now know what the small boulder responsible for the “mystery hut” mirage, now dubbed “Jade Rabbit,” stood out so well at the rim of a crater. 6) are relatively rare in comparison with those scattered around the landing site,” the story authors write.
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The Yutu-2 rover found the terrain to be relatively flat and free of rocks compared with areas on the side of the Moon facing Earth, such as the Mare Imbrium explored by the first Yutu rover from 2013 to 2015, and by Luna 17 and Apollo 15 in the early 1970s. In the first 25 lunar days (around 738 Earth days) of Yutu-2’s mission, the rover crawled over more than 2,700 feet across the 110-mile diameter Von Kármán impact crater within the Aitken Basin at the Moon’s southern polar region. The far side terrain is relatively flat and free of rocks Yutu-2 made three critical discoveries by playing in the lunar dirt, all of which could have implications for future robotic and human exploration of the far side of the Moon and our satellite’s southern polar region.
The results could help guide further lunar exploration by both China and the US.
While missions like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have provided detailed maps of the entire lunar surface, Yutu-2 has yielded information about the subsurface structure of the Moon’s far side and details about the lunar regolith that you can only learn by physically stirring up the dirt. The far side of the Moon as imaged by the Clementine spacecraft in 1998.
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