SEOUL: South Korea's first lunar orbiter successfully launched on a year-long mission to observe the Moon, Seoul said on 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. Danuri 'successfully entered orbit towards the moon', Seoul's vice science minister Oh Tae-seok told reporters later on Friday, saying that researchers were already communicating with Danuri through Nasa's deep-space antenna in Canberra, Australia.

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