SEOUL-- The following are quick facts about South Korea's homegrown space rocket Nuri, or Korea Space Launch Vehicle-II (KSLV-II), which was launched from the Naro Space Center in the country's southern coastal town of Goheung.

-- Nuri means 'world' in Korean and is also known as the Korea Space Launch Vehicle-II (KSLV-II). It is a three-stage rocket developed to put a 1.5-ton satellite into the low orbit of 600-800 kilometers above the Earth.

-- The 47.2-meter-long, 200-ton Nuri rocket has a maximum diameter of 3.5 meters and uses four 75-ton liquid thrust engines in the first stage, a 75-ton liquid engine in the second stage, and a 7-ton liquid engine in the third stage.

-- For Thursday's launch, the rocket will carry a 1.5-ton dummy satellite into space.

-- The launch site is the Naro Space Center in Goheung, South Jeolla Province, 473 kilometers south of Seoul.

-- When launched, the rocket is designed to fly southward from the launch site on the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula, with the first stage expected to fall about 413 km away from the launch site and the pairing separation about 1,514 km away before the second stage falling in the sea about 2,800 km away from the launch site.

-- Its planned flight sequence shows that the first stage separation will take place 127 seconds after the launch at an altitude of 59 km, with the pairing separation to come at 233 seconds at an altitude of 191 km. Then, the second stage separation will occur at 274 seconds at 258 km high, and the dummy satellite will be separated at 967 seconds, or about 16 minutes after the launch at 700 km above the Earth.

-- South Korea has invested a total of 1.96 trillion won (US$1.7 billion) since 2010 for the Nuri development project. More than 300 domestic companies have taken part, including Hanwha Aerospace Co. that took charge of assembling the 75-ton liquid propellant rocket engines, dubbed "the heart" of the rocket.

-- Nuri is independently developed with South Korea's indigenous rocket technologies, from designing and manufacturing to testing and launching, a significant leap forward for a country that has so far relied heavily on foreign resources for space launch vehicle development.

-- When successful, the liftoff would make South Korea the seventh country in the world to have developed a space launch vehicle that can carry a more than 1-ton satellite, after Russia, the United States, France, China, Japan and India.

Source: Yonhap News Agency