Enlarge / Artist's illustration of the COSI spacecraft. (credit: Northrop Grumman/European Southern Observatory (background image)) A small research satellite designed to study the violent processes behind the creation and destruction of chemical elements will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2027, NASA announced Tuesday. The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission features a gamma-ray telescope that will scan the sky to study gamma-rays emitted by the explosions of massive stars and the end of their lives.