Spectacular advances in the understanding of the Big-Bang model of cosmology have been due to increasingly accurate observations of the properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The detector sensitivities of modern experiments have permitted to measure fluctuations of the CMB temperature with such a sensitivity that the contamination of the data by astrophysical foreground radiations, rather than by instrumental noise, is becoming the major source of limitation. This will be the case, in particular, for the upcoming observations by the Planck mission, to be launched by ESA in 2008 (Lamarre et al. [36], Mandolesi et al. [41], Lamarre et al. [35]), as well as for next-generation instruments dedicated to the observation of CMB polarization.