The Status of the COMPASS Experiment

One of the important goals of the COMPASS experiment is the determination of the gluonic contribution to the spin of the nucleon. By using the photon gluon fusion (PGF) process in polarised deep inelastic scattering direct access to the gluon polarisation can be obtained. The PGF is selected via the detection of open charm or high $p_T$ hadron pairs. In 2001 a large part of the experiment had been setup and during a two weeks period first data was taken. In this paper some achievements of the run in 2001 are presented together with first preliminary analysis results.