Chinese spacecraft discovers mysterious cubes on other planets

 Before it "died", China's Zhurong lander used ground-penetrating radar to detect mysterious cubes buried 35m below the Utopia Planitia region of the red planet.

According to Universe Today, the mysterious blocks on the red planet resemble wedges but have a complex, uneven polygonal surface. Their width ranges from a few centimeters to tens of meters.

Scientists believe the mysterious cubes are the result of Mars' freeze-thaw cycle billions of years ago , but could also be related to volcanism and the cooling of lava.

China's Zhurong spacecraft is operating on the red planet - (Photo: CNSA).

The objects were revealed thanks to an analysis of Zhurong's "legacy" carried out by scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Zhurong is a lander designed as a rover, capable of traversing the complex terrain of Mars and studying the surface and interior structures of the red planet.

The Zhurong rover is now out of commission after being hit by an extreme Martian dust storm that covered its solar panels, but the massive dataset it managed to collect promises to yield important research years from now.

In this study, the Chinese research team used additional data from the country's two Tianwen-1 orbiters as well as the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express.

The results, published in Nature, show that a total of 16 cubes were identified in an area measuring 1.2 kilometers in diameter, suggesting that similar structures may be widespread across the Utopia Plantia plain.

These structures may have formed 3.7–2.9 billion years ago during the Late Hesperian, also known as Mars' "early Amazonian ," possibly paralleling the end of the ancient wet environment.

Although terrain with strange polygonal blocks has been seen in some areas on Mars, this is the first time buried structures have appeared.

Their presence could be related to a range of activities from snowfall in the air to phenomena within Mars' underground aquifers, combined with the effects of multiple floods.

Either way, climate change is what caused the cubes to form, so studying them could help unravel the mystery of how the Red Planet's climate changed as it transitioned from a habitable world like Earth to the dead planet it is today.