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C.D. Winant (Center for Particle Astrophysics, UC Berkeley (CfPA) & Dept. of Physics, UC Berkeley (UCB)), P. Ade (QMWC), A. Balbi (Universita di Roma II & CfPA), J. Bock (JPL & CalTech), J Borrill (LBNL & CfPA), A. Boscaleri (IROE-CNR), P. De Bernardis (Universita di Roma I), P. Ferreira (U. Oxford & CENTRA, Instituto Superior Tecnico), S. Hanany (U. Minnesota/Twin Cities & CfPA), V. Hristov (CalTech), A.H. Jaffe (CfPA & UCB), B. Johnson (U. Minnesota/Twin Cities), A.E. Lange (CalTech & CfPA), A.T. Lee (CfPA & UCB), P.D. Mauskopf (U. Mass. Amherst), C.B. Netterfield (U. Toronto), S. Oh (CfPA & UCB), E. Pascale (IROE-CNR), B. Rabii (CfPA & UCB), P.L. Richards (CfPA & UCB), G. F. Smoot (LBNL & CfPA & UCB), R. Stompor (CfPA & UCB), J.H.P. Wu (UCB)
We discuss the status of our analysis of the data obtained from the first flight of the MAXIMA balloon borne experiment. The flight (MAXIMA-1) took place in August of 1998 from the National Scientific Ballooning Facility in Palestine, Texas. During the four hour flight we mapped a 124 deg2 section of the sky which has extremely low galactic dust contamination. The combination of the beam size and scan strategy make MAXIMA sensitive to CMB fluctuations on a range of angular scales from 10 arcmin to 5 degrees. The instrument consists of a Gregorian telescope with a 1.3 m primary mirror and a receiver housing a 16 element bolometer array cooled to 100 mK. Observations were made at 3 frequency bands centered on 150, 240, and 410 GHz. The results presented will include maps of the CMB anisotropy at 150 GHz.
We will also briefly describe the second MAXIMA flight that took place in June of 1999 and our plans for the future. During the second flight we observed 230 deg2 of sky with very low galactic dust contamination. About 20% of this region overlaps the MAXIMA-1 map.
The MAXIMA experiment is supported by NASA through grants NAG5-4454, and NAG5-3941, and by the Center for Particle Astrophysics, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center operated by the University of California, Berkeley, under Cooperative Agreement No. AST-9120005.