Space Telescope NASAThe spacecraft, which will explore the universe in high-energy gamma-ray light, will launch into orbit with SpaceX in a few years. The agency announced its selection on Tuesday, July 2. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 It’s a rocket for the Compton Spectrometer and Imager mission, or COSI for short. If all goes according to plan, the observatory will launch from the Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral in Florida in August 2027.

The fixed-price launch contract is worth $69 million, NASA officials said. NASA selected COSI for development and launch in 2021. The astrophysics mission, which has a pre-launch price of $145 million, was originally scheduled to fly in 2025.

“This wide-field gamma-ray telescope will study energetic events in the Milky Way and beyond, including the creation and destruction of matter and antimatter and the final stages of stellar life,” agency officials said in a statement Tuesday.

COSI will “study the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons, uncover sites of nucleosynthesis in our galaxy, perform gamma-ray polarization studies, and find analogues of multiple messenger sources,” they added.

“Multiple message sources” are space objects or events that can be studied using different types of signals, for example both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.

COSI’s spaceflight booking completes the long launch manifest for today’s most actively flying rocket, the Falcon 9. The partially reusable launch vehicle has launched 67 times through 2024. Forty-eight of those missions were dedicated to building SpaceX’s Starlink internet megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.