Derrick Henry
SpaceX has received a $69 million contract to provide launch services for NASA’s Compton Spectrometer and Imager space mission.
The COSI mission is scheduled to lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in August 2027, NASA said Tuesday.
The space agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center will work with the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, the University of California, San Diego, the Naval Research Laboratory and Northrop Grumman on the program.
When it becomes operational, the Compton telescope will explore energetic phenomena in the Milky Way and study the creation and destruction of matter and antimatter during a star’s final stages of life.
The telescope features enhanced sensitivity, spectral resolution, angular resolution and sky coverage to support the mission’s goal of better understanding the Milky Way and the universe.
Using the gamma-ray telescope, NASA said it will investigate the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons and uncover the sites of nucleosynthesis within the galaxy.
The COSI mission will also probe gamma-ray polarization and discover counterparts to multi-messenger sources, the space agency added.
