Who is known as father of Artificial Intelligence?

The correct answer is B, Soyuz T-11. Rakesh Sharma flew on Soyuz T-11, launched from Baikonur on 2 April 1984, and docked with the Soviet space station Salyut 7. The flight was part of the Interkosmos programme, under which the Soviet Union carried cosmonauts of friendly countries, and Sharma carried out experiments in biomedicine and remote sensing.

Option A, Vostok 1, carried Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, in April 1961. Option C, Apollo 11, was the American mission that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in July 1969. Option D, Shenzhou-5, carried Yang Liwei in October 2003 and made China the third country to launch a human being into orbit on its own. Keeping these four spacecraft and their firsts apart is the point of the question.

The correct answer is B, Bengaluru. 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.

Option A, Thiruvananthapuram, is the home of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, where launch vehicles are developed, and of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre at Valiamala. Option C, Ahmedabad, is the home of the Space Applications Centre and of the Physical Research Laboratory founded by Vikram Sarabhai. Option D, Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, is the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, the launch site, and Gaganyaan will lift off from there even though the programme is directed from Bengaluru.

The correct answer is A, the crew module and the service module. 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. The service module is an unpressurised section carrying propulsion, power generation, thermal control and other support systems, and it is separated before re-entry.

Option B, lander and rover, describes Chandrayaan-3, where Vikram and Pragyan worked on the Moon. Option C, orbiter and propulsion module, describes the earlier lunar missions, which had to place a spacecraft in lunar orbit. Option D is wrong because the cryogenic stage belongs to the launch vehicle and burns out long before orbit is reached, so it is never part of the spacecraft. Knowing which part comes back is the detail most often tested.

The correct answer is B, the crew escape system. TV-D1, the first test vehicle abort mission, was launched from Sriharikota on 21 October 2023. A single stage test vehicle carried the crew module and the crew escape system to about transonic speed, the abort was commanded, the escape motors pulled the crew module clear, and the module came down under parachutes and was recovered from the sea.

Option A is wrong because the cryogenic stage was not part of the test vehicle at all. Option C is wrong because docking is being proved separately, notably through the SpaDeX experiment, and is not part of the first Gaganyaan flight plan. Option D is wrong because a lunar lander belongs to the Chandrayaan programme and has nothing to do with this test. An earlier pad abort test in 2018 had already shown the same escape system working from a stationary rocket on the pad.

The correct answer is A, a half-humanoid robot. 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. It has a head, arms and a torso but no legs, and it is meant to sit in the crew seat, monitor cabin parameters, operate switches and report back, so that the systems a human crew will depend on are tested first.

Option B is wrong because the cryogenic engines of the LVM3 have their own designations. Option C is wrong because mission control works from the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network and the Mission Control Centre, not from anything called Vyommitra. Option D is wrong because the Indian crew's spacesuit is a separate development and carries no such name. Questions on this topic usually pair Vyommitra with the uncrewed test flights.