ISRO Trivia
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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 01Narendra Modi quipped that ISRO's ₹450-crore Mars orbiter cost less than which Hollywood space film?
Gravity
Gravity, the 2013 Sandra Bullock thriller, cost more than India's first mission to another planet; Modi also priced the trip at ₹7 a kilometre, cheaper than a ₹10-a-kilometre autorickshaw ride in Ahmedabad.
Q 02ISRO's Mars orbiter was pictured on the back of which Indian banknote, launched in the 2016 demonetisation?
₹2,000
₹2,000 notes carried Mangalyaan where their sister notes show heritage sites such as the Red Fort; the Reserve Bank began withdrawing them from circulation in May 2023, under seven years after launch.
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, 'better than the whole world', is the opening of a patriotic Urdu poem by Muhammad Iqbal; Sharma, who spent nearly eight days in orbit, borrowed it to answer the prime minister.
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 took over from Vikram Sarabhai's INCOSPAR committee that day, yet stayed under the Department of Atomic Energy until a Department of Space was set up in 1972.
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 rode one PSLV, nearly tripling the old record of 37; the 88 shoebox-sized Doves gave their owner, Planet, enough cameras in orbit to photograph all of Earth's land every day.
Q 06ISRO's crewed spaceflight programme, announced by Narendra Modi in 2018, is named what?
Gaganyaan
Gaganyaan, roughly 'sky craft', is meant to carry three Indians to a 400 km orbit for three days; Modi promised an Indian 'son or daughter' would fly by 2022, carrying the national flag, a date that has since slipped.
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 08What failed aboard ISRO's first NavIC satellite, forcing it to launch a replacement?
Atomic clocks
Atomic clocks: all three rubidium clocks on IRNSS-1A had failed by early 2017, and without its timekeepers a navigation satellite's signals are too coarse to compute a position from.
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, used a modified missile-defence interceptor to smash a satellite just under 300 km up on 27 March 2019; ISRO's part was launching the target, Microsat-R, two months earlier.
Q 10The first rocket fired from Thumba in 1963, a two-stage sounding rocket, 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 11When India's rocket programme began at Thumba in 1963, its scientists set up shop in what kind of building?
A church
A church, St Mary Magdalene's, was handed over by the local bishop along with his own house, and a cattle shed became the laboratory; the church now houses a space museum.
Q 12Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram, was picked as India's first launch site for lying almost on which line?
The magnetic equator
The magnetic equator, not the geographic one far to the south, runs close to Thumba; that made the fishing village ideal for sounding rockets sent up to probe the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.
Q 13Which Soviet launch site sent up India's first satellite in 1975 and Bhaskara-I four years later?
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 came home in 1966 from posts at MIT and in Dallas, where he had experiments aboard NASA's Pioneer and Explorer probes, and ran ISRO from 1984 to 1994.
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; the schools policy his panel drafted replaces the old 10+2 structure with a 5+3+3+4 design that brings three-year-olds into formal education.
Q 23INSAT-1B, the first successful satellite of India's INSAT system, was released in 1983 from which NASA Space Shuttle?
Challenger
Kapustin Yar
Kapustin Yar, Russia's first missile test range, launched both craft for ISRO; India had no rocket of its own able to orbit a satellite until the SLV-3 succeeded in 1980.
Q 14ISRO's four-stage PSLV alternates which two kinds of propulsion from stage to stage?
Solid and liquid
Solid and liquid stages alternate on the PSLV: a solid first stage delivers the high thrust needed for lift-off, and twin liquid engines on the small fourth stage steer each satellite into its exact orbit.
Q 15Which ISRO rocket was saddled with the nickname 'naughty boy' after a string of launch failures?
GSLV
GSLV earned the tag for its unpredictability, with trouble dogging its complex cryogenic upper stage; after a clean flight in February 2024 its mission director declared that the naughty boy had become disciplined.
Q 16ISRO's heaviest rocket carried 36 satellites at a time in 2022 and 2023 for which satellite-internet constellation?
OneWeb
OneWeb turned to ISRO after suspending its Russian Soyuz launches over the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; two flights of 36 satellites each, booked through ISRO's commercial arm, completed the 72-satellite contract in March 2023.
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, lent his name to the launcher for its heavy lifting; ISRO built it to cut India's reliance on foreign rockets for its heaviest communications satellites.
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, flew in 1984 to which Soviet orbital station?
Salyut 7
Salyut 7 took in Sharma's Soyuz T-11 crew a day after launch, and the whole flight lasted 7 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes; aboard, he did yoga exercises daily to test whether they eased the effects of weightlessness.
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 and no legs, Vyommitra introduced herself to reporters as a 'half humanoid' and can work the crew module's switch panels; her name joins the Sanskrit words for space and friend.
Challenger released INSAT-1B on STS-8, and the satellite set the timetable: placing it in the right orbit forced the shuttle programme's first night launch, in the small hours of 30 August 1983.
Q 24IRS-1A, India's first operational Earth-observation satellite, rode a Vostok rocket in 1988 from which cosmodrome?
Baikonur
Baikonur, the site that launched Sputnik and Gagarin, lofted IRS-1A because no Indian rocket could yet put a satellite of nearly a tonne into polar orbit; the PSLV, built for that job, first succeeded in 1994.
Q 25ISRO's MetSat-1 weather satellite was renamed in 2003 to honour which astronaut?
Kalpana Chawla
Kalpana Chawla died when the shuttle Columbia broke up in February 2003, and four days later prime minister Vajpayee told a condolence meeting in Parliament that MetSat-1 would carry her name as Kalpana-1.
Q 26APPLE, ISRO's first communications satellite, rode which European rocket into orbit 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 finishes the job each launch starts: a rocket leaves a new INSAT or GSAT short of its final orbit, and controllers there raise it the rest of the way, test its payload and hold it in its slot for life.
Q 28ISRO built its deep-space tracking station at Byalalu, near Bengaluru, to follow which spacecraft?
Chandrayaan-1
Chandrayaan-1 was ISRO's first craft to leave Earth orbit, so it raised 18- and 32-metre dishes at the hamlet of Byalalu to hear it from the Moon; the same station later tracked the Mars orbiter.
Q 29SRE-1, the first capsule ISRO brought back from orbit, splashed down in 2007 in which body of water?
Bay of Bengal
Bay of Bengal waters caught SRE-1 off Sriharikota after 12 days in orbit: silica tiles took the heat of re-entry, parachutes slowed it to 12 metres a second, and a float held it up until a coast guard ship arrived.
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.