UPSC GK Questions 2026

The Ramappa temple stands at Palampet in the Mulugu district of Telangana. It was built in the early thirteenth century under the Kakatiya rulers of Warangal by their general Recharla Rudra, and is named after its sculptor Ramappa, a rare case of a temple carrying its craftsman's name.

Rani ki Vav stands at Patan on the bank of the Saraswati in Gujarat and was built in the eleventh century during the Solanki or Chaulukya period, by tradition as a memorial raised by Queen Udayamati.

This park in Sikkim was inscribed in 2016 under both the natural and the cultural criteria, which makes it India's only mixed site.

India's first four World Heritage Sites were inscribed together in 1983: the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort in Uttar Pradesh, and the Ajanta and Ellora caves in Maharashtra.

The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 1972 and came into force in 1975 once enough countries had ratified it.

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.

He began the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque at Delhi in 1192 after the second battle of Tarain, using the carved pillars and stones of temples that stood on the site, which is why its courtyard colonnade carries Indian bells, chains and foliage.

Tughlaq building is the most austere phase of the Sultanate style. It uses local grey sandstone or rubble, keeps ornament to a minimum and gives its walls a pronounced batter, that is a slope inward as they rise, which makes even a tomb look like a fort.

The Sidi Sayyid mosque in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, was built in 1573 in the last years of the Gujarat Sultanate.

Nur Jahan built it at Agra between 1622 and 1628 for her father Mirza Ghiyas Beg, who held the title Itmad-ud-Daulah.