India successfully launched the Chandrayaan 2 moon mission last month
The government has announced a quiz on space technology, whose winners will get a chance to watch live with Prime Minister Narendra Modi the Chandrayaan 2 moon mission spacecraft make a soft landing on the lunar soil in September.
PM Modi was present in the mission operations centre in Bengaluru when Mangalyaan was steered into the orbit of Mars in 2014.
He watched live the lift-off of Chandrayaan 2 on July 22 when the 'Baahubali' rocket put the spacecraft into the Earth's orbit.
India's 3.8-tonne Chandrayaan 2 satellite is in good shape and four orbit raising operations have been successfully completed. On August 14, Chandrayaan 2 will be nudged towards the moon and a soft landing is scheduled for the night of September 6 or 7.
If India soft lands on the moon by putting the Vikram lander and Pragyaan rover on the moon surface successfully, it would become the fourth country to execute this complex feat after the US, Russia and China.
All Indian citizens are eligible to participate in the quiz on mygov.in which will have to be completed online. It has 20 questions that need to be answered in 300 seconds. The quiz will be launched on August 10, and would be open for 10 days.
PM Modi had announced about the quiz in his last Mann Ki Baat address.
After the soft landing on the moon, or as ISRO Chairman K Sivan terms it, the "15 minutes of terror", the rover will carry out research, including a thorough mapping of the moon's resources, looking for the presence of water on the moon and clicking high resolution images as well.
The ISRO chairman has called Chandrayaan 2 the "most complex mission ever undertaken by ISRO".
Considering ISRO's budget is less than 1/20th of USA's NASA, a success story for the Rs 1,000-crore moon mission, which cost less than Hollywood blockbuster 'Avengers: Endgame', would be a giant boost for India's space plans.