DETERMINING COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS FROM THE MICROWAVE BACKGROUND

Recently funded satellites will map the cosmic microwave background ra diation with unprecedented sensitivities and angular resolutions. Assu ming only primordial adiabatic scalar and tensor perturbations, we eva luate how accurately experiments of this type will measure the basic c osmological parameters Omega (the total density of the Universe), Omeg a(b) (the baryon density), h (the Hubble constant), and Lambda (the co smological constant). The proposed experiments are capable of measurin g these parameters at the few-percent level. We briefly discuss the ge nerality of these estimates and complications arising in actual data a nalysis.