South Korea’s first lunar space probe, Danuri, took off on Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Florida (United States), for a one-year mission, according to images broadcast live on the Internet.
Carried by a Falcon 9 rocket from the SpaceX group, the Danuri orbiter (a contraction of “Dal”, which means Moon, and “Nuri” which means profit) must arrive near the Moon in mid-December.
“This is a very important milestone in the history of Korean space exploration,” said Lee Sang-ryool, president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), in a pre-launch video.