This story is from January 15, 2019

Green signal for LIGO construction in Hingoli

The construction of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in India will begin soon at Hingoli in Maharashtra, about 450km from Pune.
Green signal for LIGO construction in Hingoli
The construction of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in India will begin soon at Hingoli in Maharashtra, about 450km from Pune
PUNE: The construction of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in India will begin soon at Hingoli in Maharashtra, about 450km from Pune. LIGO officials in India have not revealed the exact location of the observatory.
Officials of the Union department of atomic energy and LIGO India had a final round of meeting at Mantralaya last week when the state environment impact assessment authority cleared the project.

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The observatory will be set up, commissioned and operated in India with help from Institute of Plasma Research (Gandhinagar), Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (Pune) and Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (Indore). IUCAA will be the key science stakeholder.
According to LIGO India spokesperson Tarun Souradeep Ghosh, the ground breaking ceremony is awaited after which construction will begin.
“The environmental clearance for construction is a big step forward for the project. We are not making any announcements as yet as the ground breaking ceremony, which will soon take place, would be momentous to give out more details,” he added.
Reports of a couple of tests are expected in the next two weeks when the site would be fully cleared.

The project is expected to be completed within eight years. The central observatory will be made in the first phase of construction, followed by the two detecting arms.
The site in India will be a 150-metre wide area with 2-4 km arms (strips of land) to the north and west directions to study the lasers.
Noted urban planner R N Gohad, who was involved in the site selection, said he had recommended the Aundha Nagnath site in Hingoli as the most suitable for this project.
“I had submitted a detailed report to IUCAA which was reviewed by scientists in the United States. They visited all the three shortlisted sites and concluded that Aundha Nagnath was most suitable for the project.”
Four sites with low seismic noise were scouted in the Deccan Plateau for the LIGO India project.
Scientists from the Indore-based Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology had identified two sites in Madhya Pradesh and one each in Rajasthan and Maharashtra.
The scout team had conducted month-long seismic surveys on 22 sites before zeroing in on the Deccan Plateau. Areas close to the sea were avoided as tides beat at 0.06 hertz causing interference.
The sites had to be 100km away from sea. The department of atomic energy had carried out detailed surveys on the proposed sites by contracting out geotechnical evaluations for the primary site.
Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, while on a visit to India in January 2018, had said that Indian scientists have made significant contributions to two sides of the project — data analytics and in understanding the shape of the waves — which could see India become a full player along with the US and Europe in the experimental side of detecting gravitational waves.
Thorne, who is LIGO’s cofounder, in his interview, had said that by 2025, Indians will be required to monitor the motions of the mirrors — which weigh 40kg — with such enormous accuracy that they receive the information.
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