Science & Technology GK Questions with Answers – Page 22

In Mission Shakti, on 27 March 2019, an interceptor developed for ballistic missile defence was used to destroy one of India's own satellites in low earth orbit, showing that the country could strike a target in space.

Astra is a beyond visual range air-to-air missile, which means it is fired from a fighter aircraft at an enemy aircraft the pilot cannot see with the eye, using radar to find and follow the target.

Nirbhay flies below the speed of sound but for a much greater distance than BrahMos, staying low to avoid radar, and it can change course in flight and loiter over an area before striking.

DRDO was formed in that year by bringing together the Technical Development Establishment of the Indian Army, the Directorate of Technical Development and Production and the Defence Science Organisation, so that defence research would be done under one roof.

BrahMos is built by BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture formed in 1998 between DRDO and the Russian firm NPO Mashinostroyeniya, and the name joins a great river of each country.

Nag is a third generation anti-tank guided missile of the fire and forget kind, which means that once the seeker has locked on to the target the operator need not keep guiding it, and the crew can move away at once.

The Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme was approved in 1983 and Kalam, then at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory, was made its head.

Shaurya is the land based version of the submarine launched K-15 Sagarika, and it is stored and fired from a sealed canister, which lets it be moved by road and launched at short notice.

An Indian Air Force pilot, Rakesh Sharma flew to the Soviet space station Salyut 7 aboard a Soyuz spacecraft in April 1984 as part of a joint mission and spent about a week in orbit, carrying out experiments in biology and remote sensing.

Launched by NASA in 1977, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and Saturn, then continued outward and has since crossed into interstellar space, making it the farthest human-made object from the earth.

The Chinese mission Chang'e 4 landed on the far side of the Moon in January 2019, the first spacecraft ever to do so, and released the rover Yutu-2.

JAXA stands for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, formed in 2003 by merging three earlier Japanese space bodies, with its headquarters at Tokyo.

The European Space Agency was founded in 1975 by a group of European countries that decided to pool their space work, and its headquarters is in Paris.

Chandrayaan-3 was launched on 14 July 2023 on an LVM3 rocket, and its lander Vikram touched down near the lunar south pole on 23 August 2023, releasing the rover Pragyan.

The Mars Orbiter Mission was launched on 5 November 2013 by a PSLV rocket and was placed in orbit around Mars on 24 September 2014.

India's first satellite was named after the ancient astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata and was launched on 19 April 1975 from a Soviet site, since India did not yet have a launch vehicle of its own.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 and became the first human being in space, a flight that lasted about one hour and forty eight minutes.

Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October 1957 and became the first artificial satellite to circle the earth, sending out a simple radio signal that stations across the world could hear.

ISRO was formed on 15 August 1969, taking over the space work that had been carried on since 1962 by the Indian National Committee for Space Research.

NASA is the civilian space agency of the United States, established in 1958 after the launch of Sputnik, with its headquarters at Washington DC.