The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will launch its newest space telescope in 2025 that will allow scientists to analyse and observe the Milky Way’s evolution closely. The mission will be supervised by John Tomsick, a research scientist at University of California, Berkeley.
This new technology has been in the works for many decades and was picked to be deeply developed from the 18 proposed telescopes in NASA’s 2019 Astrophysics Explorers Program.
The Explorers Program uses principal investigator-led space research that supplies low-cost access to space, and it has launched more than 90 missions since its first ever expedition in 1958. The studies carried out are suitable for the agency’s astrophysics and heliophysics programs.
Moreover, the operation has an estimated cost of $145 million dollars, and this does not include the launch price since NASA has yet to choose a launch provider.
The telescope, denominated Compton Spectrometre and Imager, or COSI, will be able to show the birth and death of many stars that we share the galaxy with. In addition, this new technology will attempt to discover the origin of antielectrons that are subatomic particles commonly found in space. Antielectrons, also known as positrons, possess properties similar to those of the electron, like its mass, but it has a positive charge instead of a negative one.
In 2016, a version of the instrument was sent by the COSI team aboard NASA’s super pressure balloon that is programmed for long flights and heavy lifts.
Furthermore, it will produce a map of the chemical elements that are liberated by the explosion of enormous stars and the place in which they were created by studying gamma rays from radioactive atoms generated during these occurrences.
Thomas Zurbuchen, administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, has stated: “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.”
Bibliography
Potter, S. (2021, October 18). NASA Selects Gamma-ray Telescope to Chart Milky Way Evolution. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-gamma-ray-telescope-to-chart-milky-way-evolution
Strickland, A. (2021, October 19). New NASA telescope will observe star birth and death in the Milky Way's evolution. CNN World. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/19/world/nasa-new-telescope-milky-way-scn/index.html