NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches Aug. 30 and is probably the space-thing I’ve been most excited about since the deployment of the JWST. Build from a leftover reconnaissance telescope (like Hubble was), Roman is designed to make catalogs of large swaths of the sky, find new planets (including in very bright areas like the center of our own galaxy), and study supernovae and their remnants.
Using gravitational microlensing to find exoplanets is amazing. I had no idea we had technology sensitive enough for that. That should unlock way more planets, because they won’t have to be aligned so precisely in their orbits relative to us.