The BINGO Project aims at building a special purpose radio telescope to map redshifted neutral hydrogen emission between z = 0.13 and 0.45. BINGO stands for Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations. It is an international project with collaborators in Brazil, China, United Kingdom, France, South Africa, Germany, and United States. It is the only radio telescope that proposes mapping neutral gas as traced by the 21cm line on large angular scales at redshift z~0.3.

Using the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs) as a standard ruler allows us to measure the expansion of the universe as a function of redshift and so, to constrain the properties of dark energy. The telescope will have no moving parts and consist of a primary mirror of about 40 m diameter and a secondary a bit smaller. It will have around 50 “pixels” (detectors). With this design, the accuracy on the measurement on the acoustic scale will be ~2% for one year of integration time, by performing a drift scan survey of 15 deg x 200 deg. This will be achieved by employing a static 40m dual-dish radio telescope with a resolution of 40 arcmin at 1 GHz.

BINGO is also a pathfinder for using the SKA as an instrument for ultra-deep large-scale IM surveys, particularly for understanding systematic errors and the data analysis challenges for extracting such small cosmological signals.