NASA has selected a new space telescope proposal that will study the recent
history of star birth, star death, and the formation of chemical elements in
the Milky Way. The gamma-ray telescope, called the Compton Spectrometer and
Imager (COSI), is expected to launch in 2025 as NASA’s latest small
astrophysics mission.
NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program received 18 telescope proposals in
2019 and selected four for mission concept studies. After detailed review of
these studies by a panel of scientists and engineers, NASA selected COSI to
continue into development.
“For more than 60 years, NASA has provided opportunities for inventive,
smaller-scale missions to fill knowledge gaps where we still seek answers,”
said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the agency’s Science
Mission Directorate in Washington. “COSI will answer questions about the
origin of the chemical elements in our own Milky Way galaxy, the very
ingredients critical to the formation of Earth itself.”
COSI will study gamma rays from radioactive atoms produced when massive
stars exploded to map where chemical elements were formed in the Milky Way.
The mission will also probe the mysterious origin of our galaxy’s positrons,
also known as antielectrons – subatomic particles that have the same mass as
an electron but a positive charge.
COSI’s principal investigator is John Tomsick at the University of
California, Berkeley. The mission will cost approximately $145 million, not
including launch costs. NASA will select a launch provider later.
The COSI team spent decades developing their technology through flights on
scientific balloons. In 2016, they sent a version of the gamma-ray
instrument aboard NASA’s super pressure balloon, which is designed for long
flights and heavy lifts.
NASA's Explorers Program is the agency's oldest continuous program. It
provides frequent, low-cost access to space using principal investigator-led
space research relevant to the astrophysics and heliophysics programs. Since
the 1958 launch of Explorer 1, which discovered Earth’s radiation belts, the
program has launched more than 90 missions. The Cosmic Background Explorer,
another NASA Explorer mission, led to a Nobel Prize in 2006 for its
principal investigators.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the
program for the agency.
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Space & Astrophysics