NASA Awards $69 Million Contract to SpaceX for UCSD-Partnered Milky Way Mission

NASA has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX for its COSI (Compton Spectrometer and Imager) mission, a project supported by UC San Diego.

The company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation in Hawthorne, will provide launch services for COSI under a firm-fixed-price contract of approximately $69 million.

The COSI mission currently is targeted to launch in August 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.

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,” NASA said in a news release.

In addition to UC San Diego, those collaborating on the mission include UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman.

The COSI principal investigator-led project management team is located at UC Berkeley. NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 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.