NASA's Roman Space Telescope will hunt exoplanets via gravitational microlensing

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launched on Aug. 30, 2026, will search for exoplanets using gravitational microlensing. It will repeatedly observe hundreds of millions of stars toward the Milky Way's center; NASA expects to find more than 1,000 planets on wide orbits and about 100,000 transiting planets.

• Roman launched on Aug. 30, 2026, and will travel about a million miles from Earth
• Its Galactic Bulge survey will image six fields roughly every 12 minutes
• More than 1,000 planets are expected to be found via microlensing
• The telescope should also detect about 100,000 transiting planets