NASA's Roman Space Telescope set to chart a 100,000-planet census and rogue worlds

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch by May 2027, will conduct a five-year survey that could detect about 100,000 transiting exoplanets and assemble the largest catalogue of rogue planets via gravitational microlensing, complemented by a coronagraphic program to image select giant planets. The mission combines a Wide Field Instrument for transit hunting with a Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey that observes six bulge fields in high cadence to capture microlensing events, enabling population-level statistics on planet occurrence—such as Earth-sized planets in habitable zones—and on rogue planets roaming the galaxy, far beyond the roughly 6,000 confirmed exoplanets today.