EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Humans live in the Milky Way galaxy, but have never actually seen most of it. Thick bands of interstellar dust have blocked Earth’s view of the galaxy's far side and its dense, star-packed core for as long as Earthlings have been looking up.

That's about to change.

On Dec 12, NASA announced the Galactic Plane Survey, an ambitious project that will use the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to map a distance roughly four times larger than ever charted, covering up to 20 billion stars across the Milky Way. The survey will take just 29 days of observations spread over two years, and it will see through the cosmic dust that has kept half the galaxy hidden.

"The Galactic Plane Survey will revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way," said Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in NASA’s official announcement.

"We'll be able to explore the mysterious far side of our galaxy and its star-studded heart. Because of the survey's breadth and depth, it will be a scientific mother lode," she said.

The key to the plan is infrared light.

While the European Space Agency's now-retired Gaia spacecraft mapped around 2 billion stars in visible light, dust blocks visible wavelengths. Roman's infrared sensors can pierce that veil like heat vision cutting through fog.

"It blows my mind that we will be able to see through the densest part of our galaxy and explore it properly for the first time," said Rachel Street, a senior scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara, California, and co-chair of the committee that selected the survey design.

The survey will scan a massive strip of sky along the Milky Way's glowing band, roughly 700 square degrees, or an area so large it would take 3,500 full moons to cover it when stargazing. Roman will observe stellar nurseries where new stars are still wrapped in shrouds of dust, dying stars that have collapsed into white dwarfs and black holes, and ancient star clusters near the galactic center that could help astronomers reconstruct the Milky Way's earliest history.

"This survey will study such a huge number of stars in so many different stellar environments that we'll be sampling every phase of a star's evolution," Street said.

The telescope will also hunt for gravitational signatures of invisible objects like isolated black holes, using a phenomenon called microlensing—where massive objects warp light from background stars as it passes by.

Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, though NASA says the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026. When it does, it will potentially reveal what's been lurking in Earth’s own cosmic backyard all along.