Cosmic Background Explorer.
Well, at least it doesn't sound as
cheesy as the
BOOMERaNg Project.
One of those
experiments that overthrows several
physicists'
pet theories and cause several other (or even the same) physicists to come up with new ones.
The COBE satellite was launched in the early 90's to get a map of the
Microwave Background Radiation that permeates the sky. It used all sorts of advanced gadgets, like a
supercooled dewar full of
liquid helium that contained the detectors. After all, it was trying to pick up radiation of temperature around 3 Kelvin. (
cold.
very cold.) and the detectors had to be colder than the radiation they were trying to pick up (otherwise, they'd just pick up their own heat, I assume).
In any case, after lots of
postprocessing by lots of
big computers, the large
cosmological result was that for one, the background radiation was very nearly uniform everywhere, meaning the radiation was very likely the leftover glow of the
Big Bang, and that there were very minor
variations in the
radiation, which were determined to be the seeds of
galaxies and other larger
structures in the
universe today.