A Long March 2-D rocket carrying China's first Dark Matter Particle Explorer satellite blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province on Thursday.

The launch, which took place at 8:12 am and in a temperature of-16 C, sent the satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit 500 kilometers above Earth in just 790 seconds.

Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that cannot be seen with telescopes but accounts for most of the matter in the universe. The existence of dark matter is inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter.