Rendering of NASA’s COSI science mission. Photo: Image by Jim Willis, courtesy of Northrop Grumman Corporation Space Systems; background image courtesy of European Southern Observatory

NASA selected SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to launch the COSI Compton Spectrometer and Imager mission. NASA announced the $69 million firm-fixed-price contract on July 2. The COSI mission is currently targeted to launch in August 2027 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

COSI is a wide-field gamma-ray telescope designed to study energetic phenomena in the Milky Way and beyond. The mission will probe the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons, uncover the sites of nucleosynthesis in our galaxy, and perform studies of gamma-ray polarization

The 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.

Northrop Grumman is building the satellite for the mission and completed a preliminary design review in February.