The NASA space agency has chosen SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for the launch of its Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission, which is scheduled to take place in August 2027 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The COSI mission, initially planned for a 2025 launch, is an astrophysics project aimed at studying high-energy gamma-ray light phenomena in the Milky Way and beyond. The mission’s primary focus includes investigating the creation and destruction of matter and antimatter, the final stages of star life cycles, and the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons.
NASA selected the COSI mission for development and launch in 2021, with an estimated cost of $145 million, excluding launch costs. The fixed-price launch contract with SpaceX is worth $69 million. The COSI mission will join a busy launch manifest for the Falcon 9, which has already launched 67 times in 2024, with 48 of those missions dedicated to building out SpaceX’s Starlink internet megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.
COSI will also study multi-messenger sources, which are cosmic objects or events that can be studied using multiple types of signals, such as gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation. This mission is expected to uncover the sites of nucleosynthesis in our galaxy, perform studies of gamma-ray polarization, and find counterparts to multi-messenger sources.
