Defence GK Questions 2026

It has three solid stages and a small liquid velocity trimming module, carries up to about 500 kg to a 500 km low earth orbit, and is designed to be assembled and launched by a small team within days so that a customer with one satellite need not wait for…

That flight carried the GSAT-14 communication satellite and was the first success of the indigenous cryogenic upper stage, which put India among the small group of countries able to build such an engine.

Its companion, the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, develops the liquid and cryogenic engines that those vehicles fly with.

PSLV-C37 carried the Cartosat-2 series satellite as its main passenger along with two Indian nano-satellites and 101 small foreign satellites, releasing all of them one after another from its restartable liquid fourth stage.

It is India's only orbital launch site, on the east coast, so vehicles can fly out eastwards over the Bay of Bengal and take the free gain from the earth's rotation while the spent stages fall harmlessly into the sea.

Chandrayaan-1 went up on PSLV-C11 in October 2008 and the Mars Orbiter Mission on PSLV-C25 in November 2013, both in the extended PSLV-XL configuration with six long strap-on motors.

The GSLV has three stages: a solid core first stage with four liquid strap-on motors, a liquid second stage using a Vikas engine, and a cryogenic upper stage that burns liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen.

The PSLV is unusual in alternating propellants between its stages: the first and third stages burn solid propellant and the second and fourth burn liquid propellant.

On 18 July 1980 the four-stage, all-solid SLV-3 placed the small Rohini RS-1 satellite in a low earth orbit from Sriharikota, and India became the sixth nation able to launch its own satellite.

Chandrayaan-3 weighed close to 3,900 kg at lift-off, far beyond the reach of any lighter Indian rocket, so it flew on LVM3, the vehicle earlier named GSLV Mk III.

The dedicatory inscriptions in the Barabar hills record the gift of the caves by Ashoka, and of the nearby Nagarjuni caves by his grandson Dasharatha, to the Ajivikas, an ascetic sect founded by Makkhali Gosala that taught a strict doctrine of destiny.

Buddhist tradition places the Third Council at Pataliputra in Ashoka's reign under the presidency of Moggaliputta Tissa, who is credited with settling disputes in the order and with the compilation of the Kathavatthu, a work of the Abhidhamma Pitaka.

The Junagadh rock inscription of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman, the earliest long inscription in polished Sanskrit, records that the embankment of the Sudarshana lake in Saurashtra was originally built by Pushyagupta, a governor of Chandragupta Maurya, and that conduits were added by Tushaspha in Ashoka's reign; it then describes the…

He was the last of the Mauryas and was killed about 185 BCE by his own commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Sunga, who then founded the Sunga dynasty with its capital at Pataliputra.

Almost all of Ashoka's inscriptions call him only Devanampiya Piyadasi, the beloved of the gods, of amiable appearance.

In the Arthashastra the Samaharta is the officer in charge of assessing and collecting the revenue of the realm from land, mines, forests, trade routes and city dues, and of keeping the accounts of income and expenditure on which the state ran.

The Sarnath capital has four lions standing back to back on an abacus that carries an elephant, a bull, a horse and a lion separated by wheels, the whole resting on an inverted lotus.

Prinsep, an official of the mint at Calcutta and secretary of the Asiatic Society, worked out the values of the Brahmi letters in 1837 and so made Ashoka's edicts readable.

It is the longest of the fourteen major rock edicts and the only source in Ashoka's own words for the war on Kalinga, the number of people killed, deported and dead of other causes, and the remorse that turned him from conquest by arms to conquest by Dhamma.

After the treaty of about 305 BCE between Chandragupta Maurya and Seleucus Nicator, the Greek ruler sent Megasthenes to Pataliputra as his ambassador.