Science & Technology GK Questions with Answers – Page 23

Aryabhata was the first satellite built by India and it was launched on 19 April 1975 from a Soviet launch site, since India had no launch vehicle of its own at the time.

The Mars Orbiter Mission was launched on 5 November 2013 by a PSLV and reached the orbit of Mars on 24 September 2014.

The Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the south polar region of the Moon on 23 August 2023, making India the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon and the first to do so near the lunar south pole.

The Visible Emission Line Coronagraph is the largest and the principal instrument aboard Aditya-L1. A coronagraph creates an artificial eclipse inside the instrument by covering the bright disc of the Sun, so that the faint outer atmosphere called the corona becomes visible.

The Lagrange point L1 of the Sun and the Earth lies between the two bodies, roughly 1.5 million or fifteen lakh kilometres from the Earth.

Aditya-L1 was launched on 2 September 2023 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota by the PSLV-C57 flight, which used the most powerful version of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

Sindhu Netra was developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation and was placed in orbit in February 2021 by the PSLV-C51 flight, the same flight whose main payload was the Amazonia-1 satellite of Brazil.

ChaSTE was carried on the Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3. It has a probe fitted with a set of temperature sensors, which was pushed into the lunar soil to a depth of about ten centimetres near the south polar region.

STUDSAT, short for Student Satellite, was the first pico satellite built in India. A pico satellite is one that weighs under about one kilogram, and STUDSAT weighed less than that.

Gaganyaan is the programme under which the Indian Space Research Organisation is preparing to send Indian astronauts into a low orbit around the Earth in a crew module of its own and bring them back safely.

Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma flew in April 1984 aboard the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-11 as part of a joint programme between the Soviet Union and India, and spent about eight days aboard the Salyut 7 space station.

Pinaka is the multi-barrel rocket launcher built for the Indian Army by DRDO's Armament Research and Development Establishment, Pune, and named after the bow of Lord Shiva.

When the government set longer term goals for the space programme in 2023, it named an Indian space station, the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and an Indian crewed landing on the Moon.

Born at Karnal in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla studied aeronautical engineering, moved to the United States and joined NASA, flying first on the shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist.

All Indian orbital launches, including the PSLV, GSLV and LVM3 flights, lift off from Sriharikota on the Andhra Pradesh coast, which has two operational launch pads.

China launched Yang Liwei aboard Shenzhou-5 in October 2003, becoming the third country after the Soviet Union and the United States to send a human into orbit on its own rocket and spacecraft.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, becoming the first human being in space.

Vyommitra, a name built from vyom for sky and mitra for friend, is a half-humanoid robot developed by ISRO to fly on an uncrewed Gaganyaan mission.

The Human Space Flight Centre, set up in 2019 as the ISRO centre responsible for the Gaganyaan programme, works from Bengaluru, which is also the location of the ISRO headquarters, the U R Rao Satellite Centre and the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network.

The crew module is the pressurised double walled cabin where the astronauts live, and it is the only part that returns to Earth, protected by a heat shield and lowered by parachutes.