India-based Neutrino Observatory

Introduction :-

Hey! Today we are gonna discuss about the INO. Here you will be familiar with it's history as well as with the dedication of the co-workers involved in it. Just a few years ago, we confronted how a national project, the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), which is to study vital particles called neutrinos, had provoked a no. of questions from ecologists, politicians and many others still knowing the fact that nothing was going wrong. The project involving the establishment of an underground laboratory, was built up in the Nilgiris during the intial time but as it was too close to tiger habitat, later on it was moved to a large cave under a rocky mountain in a village named Bodi in the west hills region of Theni district, about 110 Km west of Madurai in Tamil Nadu. The delayed as well as the most important physics project was then needed to explain it's centrality before the world. 

 In 1960s, India was among the pioneers in the neutrino research and at that time, such kind of laboratories were started to be established in the states of india. India was leading the neutrino research when the most genius physicists group of india used a gold mine at Kolar station in Karnataka to set-up the then world's deepest underground laboratory called as the Kolar Gold Field Lab. By the year 1965,  It enabled researchers to detect atmospheric neutrinos. In 1992, as the economy of the mine went down, the laboratory was forced to shut down. Along with that, we lost our benifit in recognising the most mysterious particle in the universe.

Most of the developed countries i.e, having advance science and technology are already working passionately in neutrino science with highly dedicated labs. These include the US, Russia, China, Italy, France, Japan and South Korea. India has not only joined this league, but also has become a key player in neutrino science all over the globe. The Magnetized Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) being set-up under INO will be among the largest ever in the world, weighing around 50k tonnes.
That's why INO needs to be built deep into the earth - At a range of 1300 metres into the earth. At this huge depth, We'd be able to keep thesse ones away from the rest trillions of neutrinos produced in the atmosphere and which would otherwise choke the neutrino detector placed on the ground. The existance of neutrino is around 14 billion years literally alike the age of the universe.
From experimental observations, its concluded that neutrinos have an extremely tiny mass, but the ordering of the neutrino's states is still unknown and is one of the thought provoking question that remain unanswered till now. This is a major challenge that INO needs to fix in order to complete the picture of neutrino. Neutrinos are very necessary for our scientific progress and technological growth for three reasons. At first, they are very abundant. Secondly, their mass is quite feeble and chargeless.

A Scientist named Wolfgang Pauli from Switzerland proposed the neutrino particles in 1930. These are also the second most widely occurring particles in the universe, just after the photons (particles making up the light). In fact, these neutrino particles  are so abundant among us that each second, there are more than 100 trillion of them passing right to each of us. None of us even notice them.

 Again, you will be astonished to know the fact that trillions of neutrinos can travel through a rock with out having any interaction even with a single atom of the rock. Thirdly, they hide themselves with in a vast pool of knowledge and can open new prospects in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, communication and even in medical imagination, through the detector spin-offs. Due to the following reasons they can travel through planets, stars, celestial bodies, rocks and human bodies without any interaction. While this should be a moment of joy, there are a no. of scepticisms, partly arising due to the fact that the neutrino, though so abundant, is a silent stranger to most of the people around the globe.