NASA has awarded SpaceX $69 million to launch its new telescope later this decade. The Compton Spectrometer and Imager or COSI is scheduled to launch in 2027 on SpaceX's Falcon 9 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The agency says that COSI is a wide-field gamma-ray telescope that will study the history of star birth, star death, and the formation of chemical elements in the Milky Way. Besides, the telescope will also probe the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons - the subatomic particle with the same mass as an electron but a positive charge.

Falcon 9 was selected to launch @NASA's COSI telescope, which will help us better understand the creation and destruction of matter, antimatter, and the final stages of starshttps://t.co/00NinXPjb9 pic.twitter.com/i69jruaetY — SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 2, 2024

Built at a cost of $145 million, the telescope will also observe the creation and destruction of matter and anti-matter at the end of a star's life.

"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," former associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen said in 2021.

The telescope is nearing its completion after decades of work which involved testing its technologies on balloons One such tests was carried out in 2016 when COSI's gamma-ray instrument on a balloon. On its 14 days of flight on the balloon, the instrument detected a 10-second gamma ray burst whose origin ranges from supernovas to black holes.