5.7 Future experiments
The next few years should bring great improvements in the quality of CMB data available, both as
regards to accuracy, and to range of coverage of angular scales. For balloon experiments, these
improvements will come through the use of long-duration balloon flights, launched e.g. in Antarctica, and
circling the pole, and from the use of arrays of detectors covering several frequency bands. Specific projects
already in the pipeline using these techniques are TOPHAT, BEAST, ACE and Boomerang. On the ground,
interferometers will play an increasingly important rôle, with three new arrays now under development,
the Very Small Array (VSA), the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), the Cosmic
Background Interferometer (CBI) and the Millimeter Anisotropy eXperiment Imaging Array
(MAXIMA). We will concentrate here briefly on a new interferometer array to be built by
Cambridge and Jodrell Bank in the U.K., and to be sited in Tenerife (the design of the three
new interferometer arrays are similar), and then discuss the two new satellite projects recently
selected.
