NASA's next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find roughly 100,000 new transiting planets in just five years — along with the largest catalogue ever assembled of rogue worlds drifting through the galaxy without a star to orbit

NASA's next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find roughly 100,000 new transiting planets in just five years — along with the largest catalogue ever assembled of rogue worlds drifting through the galaxy without a star to orbit

According to NASA’s December 2025 announcement that construction of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope had been completed, the observatory is on track for launch by May 2027, with a possible earlier launch in fall 2026. The five-year primary mission is expected to produce one of the largest exoplanet catalogues in the history of astronomy. Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard, summarised the projections in the annou…