40 Fun Facts About ISRO

Narendra Modi quipped that ISRO's ₹450-crore Mars orbiter cost less than which Hollywood space film?

Gravity, the 2013 Sandra Bullock thriller, cost more than India's first mission to another planet; Modi also priced the trip at ₹7 a kilometre, cheaper than a ₹10-a-kilometre autorickshaw ride in Ahmedabad.

ISRO's Mars orbiter was pictured on the back of which Indian banknote, launched in the 2016 demonetisation?

₹2,000 notes carried Mangalyaan where their sister notes show heritage sites such as the Red Fort; the Reserve Bank began withdrawing them from circulation in May 2023, under seven years after launch.

Asked by Indira Gandhi how India looked from orbit, Rakesh Sharma replied with the title of which patriotic song?

Saare Jahan Se Achha, 'better than the whole world', is the opening of a patriotic Urdu poem by Muhammad Iqbal; Sharma, who spent nearly eight days in orbit, borrowed it to answer the prime minister.

ISRO was founded in 1969 on which date, one that Indians already mark every year as a national holiday?

15 August, Independence Day, is ISRO's birthday too: it took over from Vikram Sarabhai's INCOSPAR committee that day, yet stayed under the Department of Atomic Energy until a Department of Space was set up in 1972.

ISRO's PSLV set a 2017 world record by releasing how many satellites on one flight, mostly tiny US-built Doves?

104 satellites rode one PSLV, nearly tripling the old record of 37; the 88 shoebox-sized Doves gave their owner, Planet, enough cameras in orbit to photograph all of Earth's land every day.

ISRO's crewed spaceflight programme, announced by Narendra Modi in 2018, is named what?

Gaganyaan, roughly 'sky craft', is meant to carry three Indians to a 400 km orbit for three days; Modi promised an Indian 'son or daughter' would fly by 2022, carrying the national flag, a date that has since slipped.

ISRO's Sun observatory Aditya-L1 circles the L1 Lagrange point roughly how far from Earth?

1.5 million km out, the L1 point lets Aditya-L1 stare at the Sun without Earth ever blocking the view. It arrived in its halo orbit in January 2024, about 18 weeks after launch.

What failed aboard ISRO's first NavIC satellite, forcing it to launch a replacement?

Atomic clocks: all three rubidium clocks on IRNSS-1A had failed by early 2017, and without its timekeepers a navigation satellite's signals are too coarse to compute a position from.

India's 2019 anti-satellite missile test, Mission Shakti, was carried out by which organisation rather than ISRO?

DRDO, the defence research agency, used a modified missile-defence interceptor to smash a satellite just under 300 km up on 27 March 2019; ISRO's part was launching the target, Microsat-R, two months earlier.

The first rocket fired from Thumba in 1963, a two-stage sounding rocket, had been built by which country?

The United States supplied the Nike-Apache sounding rocket that opened India's space age on 21 November 1963. Thumba was later dedicated to the United Nations so any country could launch research rockets there.

When India's rocket programme began at Thumba in 1963, its scientists set up shop in what kind of building?

A church, St Mary Magdalene's, was handed over by the local bishop along with his own house, and a cattle shed became the laboratory; the church now houses a space museum.

Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram, was picked as India's first launch site for lying almost on which line?

The magnetic equator, not the geographic one far to the south, runs close to Thumba; that made the fishing village ideal for sounding rockets sent up to probe the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.

Which Soviet launch site sent up India's first satellite in 1975 and Bhaskara-I four years later?

Kapustin Yar, Russia's first missile test range, launched both craft for ISRO; India had no rocket of its own able to orbit a satellite until the SLV-3 succeeded in 1980.

ISRO's four-stage PSLV alternates which two kinds of propulsion from stage to stage?

Solid and liquid stages alternate on the PSLV: a solid first stage delivers the high thrust needed for lift-off, and twin liquid engines on the small fourth stage steer each satellite into its exact orbit.

Which ISRO rocket was saddled with the nickname 'naughty boy' after a string of launch failures?

GSLV earned the tag for its unpredictability, with trouble dogging its complex cryogenic upper stage; after a clean flight in February 2024 its mission director declared that the naughty boy had become disciplined.

ISRO's heaviest rocket carried 36 satellites at a time in 2022 and 2023 for which satellite-internet constellation?

OneWeb turned to ISRO after suspending its Russian Soyuz launches over the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; two flights of 36 satellites each, booked through ISRO's commercial arm, completed the 72-satellite contract in March 2023.

ISRO's heaviest rocket, with two giant strap-on boosters, got which press nickname from a 2015 film strongman?

Bahubali, the muscle-bound hero of S. S. Rajamouli's epic, lent his name to the launcher for its heavy lifting; ISRO built it to cut India's reliance on foreign rockets for its heaviest communications satellites.

Which ISRO astronaut-designate became the first Indian on the International Space Station, as pilot of Axiom Mission 4?

Shubhanshu Shukla spent 20 days in space, running Indian experiments on muscle loss, microbes and crop seeds, 41 years after Rakesh Sharma's flight. The other three names are his fellow trainees for India's own crewed launch.

Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space, flew in 1984 to which Soviet orbital station?

Salyut 7 took in Sharma's Soyuz T-11 crew a day after launch, and the whole flight lasted 7 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes; aboard, he did yoga exercises daily to test whether they eased the effects of weightlessness.

What is Vyommitra, unveiled by ISRO in 2020 to ride an uncrewed test flight before any astronaut does?

A humanoid robot with a woman's face and no legs, Vyommitra introduced herself to reporters as a 'half humanoid' and can work the crew module's switch panels; her name joins the Sanskrit words for space and friend.

Which ex-ISRO chairman, who led the building of India's first satellite, entered the Satellite Hall of Fame in 2013?

U. R. Rao came home in 1966 from posts at MIT and in Dallas, where he had experiments aboard NASA's Pioneer and Explorer probes, and ran ISRO from 1984 to 1994.

Which 1990s ISRO chairman later headed the committee that drafted India's National Education Policy of 2020?

K. Kasturirangan ran ISRO from 1994 to 2003; the schools policy his panel drafted replaces the old 10+2 structure with a 5+3+3+4 design that brings three-year-olds into formal education.

INSAT-1B, the first successful satellite of India's INSAT system, was released in 1983 from which NASA Space Shuttle?

Challenger released INSAT-1B on STS-8, and the satellite set the timetable: placing it in the right orbit forced the shuttle programme's first night launch, in the small hours of 30 August 1983.

IRS-1A, India's first operational Earth-observation satellite, rode a Vostok rocket in 1988 from which cosmodrome?

Baikonur, the site that launched Sputnik and Gagarin, lofted IRS-1A because no Indian rocket could yet put a satellite of nearly a tonne into polar orbit; the PSLV, built for that job, first succeeded in 1994.

ISRO's MetSat-1 weather satellite was renamed in 2003 to honour which astronaut?

Kalpana Chawla died when the shuttle Columbia broke up in February 2003, and four days later prime minister Vajpayee told a condolence meeting in Parliament that MetSat-1 would carry her name as Kalpana-1.

APPLE, ISRO's first communications satellite, rode which European rocket into orbit in 1981?

Ariane carried APPLE on one of its earliest test flights from Kourou, and the satellite worked despite one solar panel refusing to unfold. The name is an acronym: Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment.

ISRO's Master Control Facility, which has steered its geostationary satellites since 1982, is in which Karnataka town?

Hassan finishes the job each launch starts: a rocket leaves a new INSAT or GSAT short of its final orbit, and controllers there raise it the rest of the way, test its payload and hold it in its slot for life.

ISRO built its deep-space tracking station at Byalalu, near Bengaluru, to follow which spacecraft?

Chandrayaan-1 was ISRO's first craft to leave Earth orbit, so it raised 18- and 32-metre dishes at the hamlet of Byalalu to hear it from the Moon; the same station later tracked the Mars orbiter.

SRE-1, the first capsule ISRO brought back from orbit, splashed down in 2007 in which body of water?

Bay of Bengal waters caught SRE-1 off Sriharikota after 12 days in orbit: silica tiles took the heat of re-entry, parachutes slowed it to 12 metres a second, and a float held it up until a coast guard ship arrived.

ISRO's winged reusable-launch test vehicle, dropped from a Chinook helicopter in landing trials, carries which name?

Pushpak, named for the flying chariot of Hindu epic, glided to a runway landing at Chitradurga after release from 4.5 km up. ISRO hopes reusable stages can cut the cost of reaching orbit by 80 percent.

Which company won the 2025 contest to take over ISRO's small SSLV rocket, building and selling it itself?

Hindustan Aeronautics beat an Adani-backed group and Bharat Dynamics for the SSLV, which lifts 500 kg and is built to launch on demand; its 2022 debut stranded its satellites before a 2023 retry worked.

ISRO's second spaceport, begun in 2024 so rockets can fly due south without crossing Sri Lanka, is in which state?

Tamil Nadu's Kulasekarapattinam lets polar launches head straight over the Indian Ocean, sparing small rockets the fuel-hungry dogleg they need from Sriharikota. Modi laid the foundation stone in February 2024.

NISAR, the joint NASA–ISRO satellite launched in 2025, watches Earth's land and ice with what kind of instrument?

Radar lets NISAR see through cloud and darkness; it carries two imaging radars, NASA's L-band and ISRO's S-band, and re-maps nearly all land and ice twice every 12 days.

ISRO's 2024 observatory that measures how X-rays from black holes are polarised complements which NASA mission launched in 2021?

IXPE reads lower-energy X-rays and ISRO's XPoSat picks up where it stops, so between them the two can watch the same black hole across a wider band than either manages alone.

Megha-Tropiques, a monsoon satellite ISRO built with France, was deliberately steered down into which ocean in 2023?

Pacific waters swallowed Megha-Tropiques on 7 March 2023 after two final braking burns, a controlled re-entry ISRO ran to avoid adding to orbital junk. Planned for three years, the satellite had returned data for about ten.

On what terms did Narendra Modi offer ISRO's 2017 South Asia Satellite to India's neighbours?

As a gift, funded entirely by India: Pakistan offered money and engineers to make it a shared project, was turned down and pulled out, which is why it flew as the South Asia Satellite and not the SAARC Satellite.

ISRO's SITE experiment of 1975–76 borrowed NASA's ATS-6 satellite for a year to bring what to 2,400 remote villages?

Television arrived on shared village sets showing farming, health and school programmes, and the year's results led India to build a satellite system of its own, INSAT, in the 1980s.

ISRO's commercial arm Antrix spent years in arbitration after India scrapped a 2005 spectrum deal with which company?

Devas Multimedia, a Bengaluru start-up run partly by former ISRO scientists, had leased S-band capacity on two satellites not yet built; after the 2011 annulment a tribunal ordered Antrix to pay it more than half a billion dollars.

Which company did India create in 2019 as ISRO's second commercial arm, to sell its rockets and satellites?

NSIL, NewSpace India Limited, was set up to pull private firms into building ISRO's rockets and to sell launches. In 2022 it leased a whole satellite, GSAT-24, to the broadcaster Tata Play, its first mission built to a customer's order.

The liquid-fuel engine on the PSLV's second stage and ISRO's heavier rockets was licensed from which French engine?

Viking technology came through a 1974 deal in which ISRO paid Société Européenne de Propulsion with 100 man-years of engineering labour, not cash. India named its version Vikas, echoing Viking and the initials of Vikram A. Sarabhai.