WASHINGTON, July 2, 2024
/PRNewswire/ -- NASA has selected Space Exploration Technologies
Corporation (SpaceX) of Hawthorne,
California, to provide launch services for the COSI (Compton
Spectrometer and Imager) mission.
The firm-fixed-price contract has a value of approximately
$69 million, which includes launch
services and other mission related costs. The COSI mission
currently is targeted to launch August
2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space
Force Station.
This wide-field gamma-ray telescope will study energetic
phenomena in the Milky Way and beyond, including the creation and
destruction of matter and antimatter and the final stages of the
lives of stars. NASA's COSI mission will probe the origins of the
Milky Way's galactic positrons, uncover the sites of
nucleosynthesis in our 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 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 development of
the project 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.
For more information about COSI, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/cosi/
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SOURCE NASA