COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPY OBSERVING STRATEGY ASSESSMENT

I develop a method for assessing the ability of an instrument, coupled with an observiug strategy, to measure the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, It allows for efficient calculation o f expected parameter uncertainties. Related to this method is a means of graphically presenting, via the ''eigenmode window function,'' the sensitivity of an observation to different regions of the spectrum, wh ich is a generalization of the traditional practice of presenting the trace of the window function. I apply these techniques to an upcoming flight of MSAM2, a balloon-borne bolometric instrument. I find that a smoothly scanning secondary is marginally better than a chopping one a nd that, in this case, a very simple analytic formula provides a good (50% or better) approximation to expected power spectrum uncertainties .