Results from the First Flight of BAM

TL;DR

The paper reports the successful first flight of BAM, a novel balloon-borne instrument designed to measure CMB anisotropy at medium angular scales, demonstrating its potential for high-quality data collection.

Contribution

First flight results of BAM, a new cryogenic differential Fourier transform spectrometer with a lightweight off-axis telescope for CMB measurements.

Findings

Demonstrated successful flight of BAM in 1995.

Validated the instrument's capability to measure CMB anisotropy.

Showed potential for high-quality data acquisition.

Abstract

A new instrument, BAM (Balloon-borne Anisotropy Measurement), designed to measure cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy at medium angular scales was flown for the first time in July of 1995. BAM is unique in that it uses a cryogenic differential Fourier transform spectrometer coupled to a lightweight off-axis telescope. The very successful first flight of BAM demonstrates the potential of the instrument for obtaining high quality CMB anisotropy data.