Introduction

The DASI telescope is the outgrowth of a collaboration between the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology; the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), the companion project to DASI, is described elsewhere in this volume. DASI is designed to provide sensitivity to the CMBR at intermediate angular scales, while the CBI extends this coverage to very small-scales. The maximum baseline separation, which sets the smallest angular scale DASI can resolve, is $120~{\rm cm}$, while the minimum baseline length is $25~{\rm cm}$, chosen to complement experiments probing the first acoustic peak. Together, these two experiments will provide continuous coverage of the CMBR power spectrum from l = 140 to l = 3500. The DASI bandpass is correlated in 10 1-GHz channels, providing spectral leverage for discrimination of foregrounds, as well as allowing frequency synthesis mapping in the image plane. An extremely sensitive imaging instrument, DASI can achieve $10~{\rm\mu K}$ rms at $20\arcmin$ resolution over its $3\fdg 4$ field of view in 24 hours.

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