  The future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is an
accelerator-based international center for fundamental and applied research,
which presently is under construction in Darmstadt, Germany. An important part
of the program is devoted to questions related to astrophysics, including the
origin of elements in the universe and the properties of strongly interacting
matter under extreme conditions, which are relevant for our understanding of
the structure of neutron stars and the dynamics of supernova explosions and
neutron star mergers. The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR
is designed to measure promising observables in high-energy heavy-ion
collisions, which are expected to be sensitive to the high-density
equation-of-state (EOS) of nuclear matter and to new phases of QCD matter at
high densities. The CBM physics program, the relevant observables and the
experimental setup will be discussed.
