Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) will provide launch services for the COSI (Compton Spectrometer and Imager) mission in a contract worth around USD69 million.
NASA announced the winning company on July 1. The COSI mission is targeting a launch in August 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The contract includes launch services and other mission-related costs.
COSI is a wide-field gamma-ray telescope that will study energetic phenomena in the Milky Way and beyond, including the creation and destruction of matter and antimatter and the final stages of stars’ lives. The mission will probe the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons, uncover nucleosynthesis sites in the galaxy, perform studies of gamma-ray polarization, and find counterparts to multi-messenger sources. The compact Compton telescope combines improved sensitivity, spectral resolution, angular resolution, and sky coverage to facilitate groundbreaking science.
The COSI mission is a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, the University of California, San Diego, the Naval Research Laboratory, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Northrop Grumman.
The COSI principal investigator-led project management team is located at the University of California, Berkeley. NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, supports the project’s development for the Astrophysics Division within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is responsible for program management of the launch services.
