The US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has selected a new space telescope proposal to study the recent history of star birth, star death, and the formation of chemical elements in the Milky Way. For the unversed, in 2019, NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program received 18 telescope proposals and selected four for mission concept studies. After a detailed review, NASA selected the gamma-ray telescope, called the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (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. 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,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said.
COSI, which is expected to launch in 2025 as NASA’s latest small astrophysics mission, 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 with 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. Since the 1958 launch of Explorer 1, which discovered Earth’s radiation belts, the program has launched more than 90 missions. Another NASA Explorer mission, the Cosmic Background Explorer, led to a Nobel Prize in 2006 for its principal investigators.
