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40 free ISRO trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
India's space agency began in 1963 with a borrowed sounding rocket fired from a fishing village, and within sixty years it was orbiting Mars for less than the cost of a Hollywood film, landing near the Moon's south pole and selling launches to the rest of the world. Few organisations have done so much with so little, and few have better stories. These 40 questions cover ISRO as an institution: the founder and the committee that came before it, the early satellites launched on Soviet and European rockets, the SLV-3 and PSLV years, the cryogenic-engine saga, Mangalyaan, the crewed programme and its astronaut-designates, the navigation constellation, the newest observatories, the chairmen, the spaceports and the commercial arms. The 2019 milestones are here too. The Moon missions have a quiz of their own, so they appear only in passing. Play it to see how much of the story you know, or print it for a school or club round; every answer comes with a one-line explanation and a source.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01ISRO's Mars orbiter cost about ₹450 crore, less than which Hollywood film about astronauts adrift in orbit?
Gravity
Gravity, the 2013 Sandra Bullock thriller, cost more to make than India's entire first mission to another planet. The orbiter reached Mars in September 2014 on its first attempt, something only Europe's agency had managed before.
Q 02ISRO's Mars orbiter appears on the back of which Indian banknote, the high-value note introduced in 2016?
₹2,000
The ₹2,000 note, issued after the 2016 demonetisation, carried the Mangalyaan spacecraft on its back. Its designers chose a space probe rather than a monument to stand for modern India.
Q 03Asked by Indira Gandhi how India looked from orbit, Rakesh Sharma replied with the title of which patriotic song?
Saare Jahan Se Achha
Saare Jahan Se Achha, meaning better than the whole world, was Sharma's answer over a live link to the prime minister. He was speaking from a Soviet space station, where he spent nearly eight days.
Q 04ISRO was founded in 1969 on which date, one that Indians already mark every year as a national holiday?
15 August
15 August, Independence Day, is ISRO's birthday too: it replaced the older INCOSPAR committee on that date in 1969. ISRO answered to a different ministry until 1972, when the Space Commission was created.
Q 05ISRO's PSLV set a 2017 world record by releasing how many satellites on one flight, mostly tiny US-built Doves?
104
104 satellites went up on one PSLV, smashing the previous record of 37 set by a Russian Dnepr rocket in 2014. The record stood until SpaceX's Transporter-1 carried 143 in January 2021.
Q 06ISRO's crewed spaceflight programme, announced in Narendra Modi's 2018 Independence Day speech, is named what?
Gaganyaan
Gaganyaan, roughly sky-craft, is the capsule meant to carry Indian crews to a 400 km orbit on India's own rocket. The programme was formally announced in Modi's 2018 Independence Day address.
Q 07ISRO's Sun observatory Aditya-L1 circles the L1 Lagrange point roughly how far from Earth?
1.5 million km
1.5 million km out, the L1 point lets Aditya-L1 stare at the Sun without Earth ever blocking the view. It arrived in its halo orbit in January 2024, about 18 weeks after launch.
Q 08ISRO's satellite navigation system, built after the US refused GPS data in the 1999 Kargil war, is called what?
NavIC
NavIC, short for Navigation with Indian Constellation, uses seven satellites to cover India and 1,500 km beyond its borders. The acronym also spells an Indian word for a sailor.
Q 09India's 2019 anti-satellite missile test, Mission Shakti, was carried out by which organisation rather than ISRO?
DRDO
DRDO, the defence research agency, built the interceptor that hit a test satellite 283 km up on 27 March 2019. ISRO's only role was having launched the target, Microsat-R, two months earlier.
Q 10The first rocket fired from Thumba in 1963, a two-stage Nike-Apache, had been built by which country?
United States
The United States supplied the Nike-Apache sounding rocket that opened India's space age on 21 November 1963. Thumba was later dedicated to the United Nations so any country could launch research rockets there.
Q 11Thumba's first rocket office and laboratory in 1963 occupied what kind of building, now a space museum?
A church
A church, St Mary Magdalene's, was given up by the local bishop and his parishioners so that India's first rockets could be assembled inside it. The building now houses a space museum that draws school groups.
Q 12Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram, was picked as India's first launch site for lying almost on which line?
The magnetic equator
The magnetic equator passes almost over Thumba, which makes it an ideal place to fire rockets into the electrically charged upper atmosphere. The rocket-design centre that grew up on the site employs about 4,500 people today.
Q 13Which Soviet launch site in Astrakhan Oblast sent up India's first satellite in 1975 and Bhaskara-I after it?
Q 21Which ex-ISRO chairman, who led the building of India's first satellite, entered the Satellite Hall of Fame in 2013?
U. R. Rao
U. R. Rao ran ISRO from 1984 to 1994 and pushed the PSLV into service, a decade after he had directed the 1975 satellite project. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in Washington at the age of 81.
Q 22Which 1990s ISRO chairman later headed the committee that drafted India's National Education Policy of 2020?
K. Kasturirangan
K. Kasturirangan ran ISRO from 1994 to 2003 and then served in the Rajya Sabha before writing the schools-and-universities overhaul. He died in April 2025 at 84.
Q 23INSAT-1B, the first successful satellite of India's INSAT system, was released in 1983 from which NASA Space Shuttle?
Kapustin Yar
Kapustin Yar, a Cold War missile test range, launched both craft for ISRO. India would not have a rocket of its own able to orbit a satellite until 1980.
Q 14ISRO's PSLV is unusual among big rockets in alternating which two kinds of propulsion from stage to stage?
Solid and liquid
Solid and liquid stages alternate on the PSLV: a solid first stage, a liquid Vikas second, then solid and liquid once more. The design let ISRO use the propellants it had already mastered instead of waiting for cryogenic engines.
Q 15Which ISRO rocket, with only two successes in its first seven flights, was saddled with the nickname 'naughty boy'?
GSLV
GSLV earned the 'naughty boy' tag during a run of failures from 2001 to 2014 while ISRO struggled to make its cryogenic upper stage work. The same rocket later launched the NISAR radar satellite for NASA in 2025.
Q 16ISRO's heaviest rocket carried 36 satellites at a time in 2022 and 2023 for which satellite-internet constellation?
OneWeb
OneWeb's first batch of 36 satellites went up on ISRO's heaviest rocket on 22 October 2022. The contract was signed through ISRO's commercial arm rather than the agency itself.
Q 17ISRO's heaviest rocket, with two giant strap-on boosters, got which press nickname from a 2015 film strongman?
Bahubali
Bahubali, the muscle-bound hero of S. S. Rajamouli's epic, became the press shorthand for the launcher. Its strap-on boosters are the largest flown outside the US and Europe.
Q 18Which ISRO astronaut-designate became the first Indian on the International Space Station, as pilot of Axiom Mission 4?
Shubhanshu Shukla
Shubhanshu Shukla spent 20 days in space, running Indian experiments on muscle loss, microbes and crop seeds, 41 years after Rakesh Sharma's flight. The other three names are his fellow trainees for India's own crewed launch.
Q 19Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space, spent nearly eight days in 1984 aboard which Soviet orbital station?
Salyut 7
Salyut 7 hosted Sharma for 7 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes after his Soyuz T-11 launch, and the Soviets made him a Hero of the Soviet Union. He later became chief test pilot at Hindustan Aeronautics.
Q 20What is Vyommitra, unveiled by ISRO in 2020 to ride an uncrewed test flight before any astronaut does?
A humanoid robot
A humanoid robot with a woman's face, Vyommitra can answer questions in Hindi and English and work the switch panels of the crew module. Its name joins the Sanskrit words for space and friend.
Challenger
Challenger deployed INSAT-1B on the STS-8 mission in late summer 1983, after INSAT-1A had been abandoned within months of its launch the year before. INSAT grew into the largest domestic communications system in the region.
Q 24IRS-1A, India's first operational Earth-observation satellite, rode a Vostok rocket in 1988 from which cosmodrome?
Baikonur
Baikonur, the same site that launched Sputnik and Gagarin, lofted IRS-1A into a polar orbit on 17 March 1988. The remote-sensing fleet it began is now the largest civilian constellation of its kind in the world.
Q 25ISRO's MetSat-1 was renamed in 2003 to honour which Indian-born astronaut killed in the Columbia disaster?
Kalpana Chawla
Kalpana Chawla's name went onto the satellite within five days of her death, by order of prime minister Vajpayee. MetSat-1 had been the first satellite the PSLV ever sent toward geostationary orbit.
Q 26APPLE, ISRO's first communications satellite, built in industrial sheds, rode which European rocket in 1981?
Ariane
Ariane carried APPLE on one of its earliest test flights from Kourou, and the satellite worked despite one solar panel refusing to unfold. The name is an acronym: Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment.
Q 27ISRO's Master Control Facility, which has steered its geostationary satellites since 1982, is in which Karnataka town?
Hassan
Hassan's control room raises each new INSAT and GSAT into its final orbit and keeps it on station for years afterwards. A second facility opened in Bhopal in 2005 to share the load.
Q 28ISRO's deep-space antennas, led by a 32-metre dish built for its first Moon mission, stand at which Karnataka village?
Byalalu
Byalalu's 32-metre dish was raised in 2008 to talk to Chandrayaan-1 and has since tracked the Mars orbiter and every ISRO probe beyond Earth orbit. The campus covers nearly 120 acres.
Q 29Which capsule did ISRO fish out of the Bay of Bengal in 2007 after 12 days in orbit, its first re-entry test?
SRE-1
SRE-1 survived re-entry behind 264 silica tiles and a carbon-phenolic nose cap, having grown crystals and melted metal in microgravity on the way. The recovery proved the heat-shield know-how ISRO later needed for crewed capsules.
Q 30ISRO's winged reusable-launch test vehicle, dropped from a Chinook helicopter in landing trials, carries which name?
Pushpak
Pushpak, named for the flying chariot of Hindu epic, glided to a runway landing at Chitradurga after release from 4.5 km up. ISRO hopes reusable stages can cut the cost of reaching orbit by 80 percent.