NASA's Nancy Grace Roman telescope will image exoplanets with coronagraph
NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on August 30, 2026, and it's about to make exoplanet hunting way cooler.
Thanks to its high-tech coronagraph, Roman can actually snap pictures of planets orbiting other stars by blocking out their blinding starlight.
This lets scientists study what these far-off worlds are really like.
Roman telescope could discover 100,000 planets
Roman's coronagraph is seriously next level: it uses special filters and deformable mirrors that can adjust in real time, so it can spot planets up to 100 million times dimmer than their stars.
With help from its Wide Field Instrument, Roman could discover 100,000 more new planets!
Even better: what Roman finds will help guide future missions (like NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory) as we keep searching for Earth-like planets out there.