  BINGO is a unique radio telescope designed to make the first detection of
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) at radio frequencies. This will be achieved
by measuring the distribution of neutral hydrogen gas at cosmological distances
using a technique called Intensity Mapping. Along with the Cosmic Microwave
Background anisotropies, the scale of BAO is one of the most powerful probes of
cosmological parameters, including dark energy. The telescope will be built in
a very low RFI site in South America and will operate in the frequency range
from 0.96 GHz to 1.26 GHz. The telescope design consists of two $\thicksim$
40-m compact mirrors with no moving parts. Such a design will give the
excellent polarization performance and very low sidelobe levels required for
intensity mapping. With a feedhorn array of 50 receivers, it will map a
$15^{\circ}$ declination strip as the sky drifts past the field-of-view of the
telescope. The BINGO consortium is composed Universidade de S\~ao Paulo,
Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Brazil), University of Manchester
and University College London (United Kingdom), ETH Z\"urich (Switzerland) and
Universidad de La Republica (Uruguay). The telescope assembly and horn design
and fabrication are under way in Brazil. The receiver was designed in UK and
will be developed in Brazil, with most of the components for the receiver will
also be supplied by Brazilian industry. The experience and science goals
achieved by the BINGO team will be advantageous as a pathfinder mission for the
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. This paper reports the current status of
the BINGO mission, as well as preliminary results already obtained for the
instrumentation development.
