The carrier Long March 2-D rocket blasts off at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province on Thursday, sending into space China’s first Dark Matter Particle Explorer Satellite. The satellite, which has been given the moniker “Wukong” after the Monkey King, the character from the Chinese classical fiction “Journey to the West,” will be in service for three years to observe the direction, energy and electric charge of high-energy particles in space in search of dark matter. First postulated in the 1930s, dark matter is believed to make up 85 percent of the matter in the cosmos and 27 percent of the known universe — but only theoretically, as it has never been observed by any instruments. So far scientists have little knowledge on dark matter, but many believe dark matter as the key to help us understand phenomena that could not be explained with current knowledge in physics.Xinhua