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50 free Chandrayaan trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
India reached the Moon on a budget smaller than most Hollywood space films, lost a lander within sight of the surface, and came back to make the first soft landing anywhere near a lunar pole. Along the way its first orbiter changed what everyone thought they knew about the Moon being bone dry. These 50 questions run through all three missions: the 2008 orbiter and its instruments, the 2019 attempt and what went wrong in the final kilometres, the 2023 landing and the rover that followed, plus the rockets, the spaceport, the scientists who led each mission and what ISRO plans next. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something the headlines left out. Play it before a space-themed quiz night, use it in a classroom after National Space Day, or find out how much of the story you actually followed.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Chandrayaan-3's landing broadcast drew eight million simultaneous viewers, a record live stream on which platform?
YouTube
ISRO's own channel set YouTube's live record on landing day, beating the 2022 World Cup peaks of Brazil's CazéTV streams.
Q 02From which island spaceport on India's east coast, in Andhra Pradesh, did all three Chandrayaan missions launch?
Sriharikota
Sriharikota sits on a barrier island between Pulicat Lake and the Bay of Bengal, picked for its empty safety zone and nearness to the equator, which helps eastward launches.
Q 03Chandrayaan-2 and -3 each carried a lander named after which physicist, the founder of India's space programme?
Vikram Sarabhai
Vikram Sarabhai earned a Cambridge PhD on cosmic rays under C. V. Raman's supervision and also helped set up the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.
Q 04Chandrayaan's six-wheeled rover is called Pragyan, a Sanskrit word meaning what?
Wisdom
Wisdom is what Pragyan means, and the rover cannot talk to mission control directly: everything it learns is relayed through its lander.
Q 05Which Russian lander crashed days before Chandrayaan-3 touched down, ending its bid to reach the south pole first?
Luna 25
Luna 25 was Russia's first Moon shot since 1976, and it hit the surface after a braking engine ran for 127 seconds instead of the planned 84.
Q 06Chandrayaan-1 deliberately crashed a probe onto the Moon in November 2008 on the birthday of which Indian leader?
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru's birthday is also India's Children's Day, and ISRO named the impact site Jawahar Sthal in his memory.
Q 07Chandrayaan-3's rover zapped the soil with its LIBS spectroscope to confirm which element near the south pole?
Sulfur
Sulfur had only been inferred from orbit before, and the same rover readings also picked up aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen.
Q 08Chandrayaan-2's lander debris was spotted in NASA images by a volunteer, Shanmuga Subramanian, from which Indian city?
Chennai
Chennai software engineer Shanmuga Subramanian compared NASA orbiter photos pixel by pixel and found the wreckage before NASA's own team confirmed it.
Q 09Before Chandrayaan-3, which country had made every successful soft landing on the Moon this century, starting in 2013?
China
China's Chang'e 3 landed in December 2013, the first soft landing anywhere on the Moon since the Soviet Union's last lander in 1976.
Q 10The programme's name Chandrayaan joins the Sanskrit word for the Moon to the word for what?
Vehicle
Vehicle is what yaan means, so the name reads as 'Moon craft', and the project was announced by the prime minister on Independence Day 2003.
Q 11Which ISRO rocket, India's heaviest with two giant solid boosters, launched Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3?
LVM3
LVM3 flew as GSLV Mk III until 2022 and can put about ten tonnes into low orbit, roughly 43 metres of rocket weighing 640 tonnes at liftoff.
Q 12Chandrayaan-1 rode which ISRO workhorse rocket, in its stretched XL variant, into orbit in October 2008?
PSLV
PSLV's XL version carried the 1,380 kg orbiter, a rocket far smaller than the heavy-lift launcher ISRO needed for the later lander missions.
Q 13During Chandrayaan-2's September 2019 landing attempt, the lander began veering off course at roughly what altitude?
2.1 km
At 2.1 km the lander had just entered its camera-guided navigation phase, and a software glitch left its engines thrusting harder than planned until contact was lost seconds from touchdown.
Q 21After dropping off its lander, Chandrayaan-3's propulsion module was steered in late 2023 into orbit around which body?
Earth
Earth orbit was reachable because the module had fuel to spare, and the manoeuvre rehearsed the homeward leg a future round-trip mission will need.
Q 22Chandrayaan-3's solar-powered rover weighed roughly how much, light enough for two people to carry?
26 kg
26 kg of rover ran on just 50 watts of solar power, about the draw of a laptop charger, and rolled down a ramp from the lander hours after touchdown.
Q 23Chandrayaan-3's six-wheeled rover was designed to creep across the lunar surface at what speed?
1 cm per second
Q 14Which foreign partner was first meant to build Chandrayaan-2's lander, before pulling out of the deal?
Roscosmos
Roscosmos could not deliver the lander even by a revised 2015 date, so ISRO built its own, a decision that pushed the launch to 2019.
Q 15Chandrayaan-3's landing site was given which name, formally recognised by the International Astronomical Union in 2024?
Statio Shiv Shakti
Statio Shiv Shakti pairs Shiva, a god linked with the Moon, with Shakti, divine feminine energy, and the prime minister announced it three days after the landing.
Q 16India's National Space Day, first held in 2024, falls on which date, the anniversary of Chandrayaan-3's touchdown?
23 August
23 August became National Space Day by government decree, and the first edition ran under the theme 'Touching Lives while Touching the Moon'.
Q 17Which ISRO chairman declared 'India is on the Moon' the moment Chandrayaan-3's lander touched down?
S. Somanath
S. Somanath had been project director of the very rocket that launched the mission, and he handed the chairmanship to V. Narayanan in January 2025.
Q 18Which ISRO chairman, the son of a mango farmer, led the agency through Chandrayaan-2's launch and lost landing in 2019?
K. Sivan
K. Sivan was filmed in tears after the lander fell silent, and the prime minister's hug for him became one of the mission's defining images.
Q 19Which engineer, later dubbed the 'Moon Man of India', was project director of Chandrayaan-1 from 2004 to 2008?
Mylswamy Annadurai
Mylswamy Annadurai went on to oversee the Mars Orbiter Mission and received the Padma Shri in 2016, having grown up in a village near Coimbatore.
Q 20Chandrayaan-1 fell silent in 2009, well short of its planned two years; how many days had it operated?
312
312 days was enough for the orbiter to complete over 3,000 orbits and send back some 70,000 images before a power-supply failure cut contact.
1 cm per second is slower than a garden snail in a hurry, a pace set so the rover could be steered by commands relayed through its lander.
Q 24Chandrayaan-3's rover covered roughly how much ground before going to sleep, against a design goal of 500 m?
About 100 m
About 100 m was all the rover managed, 101.4 m to be exact, partly because it had to detour around a crater it met early on.
Q 25Chandrayaan-3's lander and rover were built to last one stretch of lunar daylight, which is roughly how many Earth days?
14
14 days of sunlight powered the solar panels, and after the long freezing night that followed, neither craft answered ISRO's wake-up calls.
Q 26Chandrayaan-3's ILSA seismometer recorded ground vibrations three days after landing that ISRO presumed to be what?
A natural moonquake
A natural moonquake had not been recorded by instruments on the surface since the Apollo seismometers were switched off in 1977.
Q 27Days after landing, Chandrayaan-3's lander refired its engines for a short 'hop', lifting itself about how high?
40 cm
40 cm up and 30 to 40 cm sideways was enough to prove the lander could relaunch, a rehearsal for a future mission that must lift off again from the Moon.
Q 28Chandrayaan-2's orbiter was planned to last one year; a fuel-saving launch stretched that to roughly how long?
About 7 years
About 7 years of life let the orbiter outlast its crashed lander and serve as a relay for Chandrayaan-3, while its camera resolves objects 32 cm across.
Q 29Chandrayaan-4, approved by India's cabinet in 2024, is designed to be India's first mission to do what on the Moon?
Bring back lunar samples
Bring back lunar samples is the goal, up to 3 kg of regolith, using a craft launched in two halves on separate rockets and docked together before heading out.
Q 30How many scientific instruments did Chandrayaan-1 carry, six of them built abroad rather than in India?
11
11 instruments shared a payload of just 90 kg, with five Indian-built and the rest supplied by NASA, ESA and one smaller partner.