Europe's first mission to the moon has blasted off aboard a European Ariane rocket from French Guiana.
The Ariane-5 rocket carrying the SMART-1 Moon exploration probe and two commercial satellites blasted off at 8.14 p.m. (2314 GMT) yesterday from the European Space Agency (ESA) launch centre at Kourou, in French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America.
Forty-one minutes after launch, the rocket released SMART-1 into space to begin a 15-month journey to reach lunar orbit.
The 370 kg (815 lb) probe will scan the Moon for up to 30 months. It is intended to demonstrate innovative technologies such as solar-electric propulsion that will be needed for future deep-space missions.
"SMART-1 will cover a distance of 100 million kilometres (62 million miles) to reach the Moon with only 60 litres of fuel," Mr Giuseppe Racca, ESA Project Manager said before the launch.
"There are many unsolved questions about the Moon, even though six NASA Apollo missions and three unmanned Soviet spacecraft have landed on it and brought back rock samples," ESA's SMART-1 Project Scientist Mr Bernard Foing said.
"The far side of the Moon - the one that never faces Earth - and the Polar Regions remain fairly unexplored. The existence of water on the Moon has also never been confirmed."