Wikipedia
Archeops was a balloon-borne instrument dedicated to measuring the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The study of this radiation is essential to obtain precise information on the evolution of the Universe: density, Hubble constant, age of the Universe, etc. To achieve this goal, measurements were done with devices cooled down at 100mK temperature placed at the focus of a warm telescope. To avoid atmospheric disturbance the whole apparatus is placed on a gondola below a helium balloon that reaches 40 km altitude.
Archeops has four bands in the millimeter domain (143, 217, 353 and 545 GHz) with a high angular resolution (about 15 arcminutes) in order to constrain small anisotropy scales, as well as a large sky coverage fraction (30%) in order to minimize the intrinsic cosmic variance.