NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to discover around 100000 previously unknown exoplanets. This would mark a major increase from the nearly 6300 worlds identified so far. The mission will survey distant regions of the Milky Way using transit and microlensing methods.
Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center say the telescope will monitor hundreds of millions of stars in the galactic bulge. It will search areas far beyond the few thousand light years where most known exoplanets have been found to date. Elisa Quintana noted that the effort will cover different galactic environments to study how planet formation varies across the Milky Way.