NASA’s Roman Mission Preps to Unveil New Populations of Faraway Worlds

This plot shows currently known exoplanets, with different categories highlighted. Roman will help fill in the bottom-right of the plot by finding small worlds in large orbits. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.

NASA’s Roman Mission Preps to Unveil New Populations of Faraway Worlds. This plot shows currently known exoplanets, with different categories highlighted. Roman will help fill in the bottom-right of the plot by finding small worlds in large orbits. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds — a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,300 found so far thanks to NASA missions working in tandem with other observatories. And Roman will primarily find them in underexplored regions of the Milky Way. “Our galaxy is home to a variety of different environments, but when it comes to hunting for exoplanets, we’ve really only explored one: our own neighborh...