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.