South Korea’s first lunar orbiter launched by SpaceX

South Korea’s first lunar orbiter successfully launched on a year-long mission to observe the Moon, Seoul said Friday, with the payload including a new disruption-tolerant network for sending data from space.

Danuri -- a portmanteau of the Korean words for “Moon” and “enjoy” -- was on a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida by Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX. It aims to reach the Moon by mid-December.

“South Korea’s first lunar orbiter ‘Danuri’ left for space at 8:08 am on August 5, 2022,” Seoul’s science ministry said in a tweet, sharing a video of the rocket blasting off trailing a huge column of smoke and flames.

Danuri “successfully entered orbit towards the moon”, Seoul’s vice science minister Oh Tae-seok told reporters later Friday, saying that researchers were already communicating with Danuri through NASA’s deep-space antenna in Canberra, Australia.