I bet you didn't know that a manmade structure was about to be placed on the moon. And, I bet that you didn't know it was not a structure made for mankind, but rather part of an art installation!

On January 15, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off, propelling ispace’s Resilience lander towards the Moon. Onboard the Resilience lander, however, is a very unusual object: a toy-sized white-trimmed red Swedish cottage called the Moonhouse. As detailed on Mikael Genberg’s website, the artist has been dreaming of putting his Moonhouse on the lunar surface for a quarter century, and now that dream is closer than ever to becoming a reality.

“So what does it mean? What’s the meaning? What’s the purpose?” Genberg asked in a video statement. He had a very simple answer: “It’s art.”

Genberg’s little red houses have previously made appearances around the world in trees, underwater, on the Great Wall of China, and even on the International Space Station. A few months from now, the Japanese-made Resilience lander is set to touch down in the northern regions of the Moon’s near side. The Moonhouse is already secured to the micro rover Tenacious, which will deploy from the lander to explore the lunar surface.

Then, “it should release the house, take some pictures and leave it alone standing there for thousands and thousands, maybe millions of years,” Genberg explained in the video. If all goes according to plan, Moonhouse will become not just the first art project on the Moon, but also technically the first building on the moon (that we know of).

Ultimately, the Moon’s first building isn’t the kind of structure we all imagined—but can we really rule out the possibility of it being the perfect size for some extra terrestrial life out there?