STATUS OF THE PILOT BALLOON-BORNE EXPERIMENT

PILOT (Polarized Instrument for Long wavelength Observations of the Tenuous ISM) is a balloon-borne experiment, designed to study the submillimeter polarized emission, arising from dust grains, present in the diffuse Interstellar medium in our Galaxy (see [1] and [2]). The measurement will be done at 240 and 550 mu m, with a scale of few arc minutes. The expected polarization degree in this case is less than 5%. So the instrumental concept of PILOT is designed to reach a very high sensitivity and low-level instrumental systematic effects.