Chinese robot Rabbit Jade 2 has come back to life and captured an unusual block of rock in the dark part of the Moon.
The Hang Nga 4 lander and Rabbit Ngoc 2 crawler “woke up” on February 6 after a period of hibernation and sent new finds back to Earth, one of which is a photo of a rock. Strangely looks like landmarks in the dark area of the moon. In the activity journal published by Our Space, the Chinese science channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration (CNSA), scientists stressed that this stone column deserves to be verified.
The crawler control group planned to let Rabbit Ngoc 2 approach the rock and perform analyzes with the infrared and near infrared (VNIS) imaging spectrometer. VNIS was previously used to study rock and limestone samples along the path through the Von Kármán impact crater. The device is able to detect scattered or reflected light from materials to explore their coatings.
“This column of rock is like a piece of debris protruding from the surface. It’s really unusual,” said researcher Moon Dan Moriarty at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, sharing the excitement with news discoveries.
Moriarty further explained that the repetitive effects caused by the heat cycle and weathering on the Moon’s surface often tend to shatter rocks and bring them to a spherical shape, with sufficient time. The newly discovered column of rock likely formed from a nearby asteroid impact without going through the above process.
Scientists hope that the spectral data from VNIS in future discoveries will provide more detailed information, allowing the rock mass to be determined from outer space or not.
