Soon after the discovery of atomic fission, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi addressed a meeting of Navy officials and civilian scientists. While other meeting participants dreamed of nuclear weapons, NRL’s Ross Gunn envisioned using nuclear power for submarine propulsion. His efforts would make NRL the first to conceive, propose, and investigate this revolutionary concept. The atomic powered submarine would become one of the most formidable weapons systems ever devised.

Launched March 17, 1958, Vanguard I, a component of the Vanguard Project, is a small aluminum sphere (16.5 cm in diameter) that was designed to partake in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) — a series of coordinated observations of various geophysical phenomena during solar maximum, spanning July 1957 through December 1958. With the launch of Vanguard I, the NRL Vanguard Project had finally begun to see many of the mission goals come to fruition, to include testing of three-stage launch vehicles, establishing a network of terrestrial tracking stations known as ‘Minitrack,’ and measuring the effects of the space environment on an Earth-orbiting satellite.

The Vanguard-1 satellite was launched into orbit on March 17, 1958. To provide a means for determining the space satellite's orbit, NRL physicist Roger Easton and his colleagues proposed, designed and built the first satellite tracking system known as MINITRACK. Construction of the U.S. Navy Space Surveillance System began in 1958 under the sponsorship of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). Initial operational capability was achieved in 1960, and the system was declared operational in 1966. This system was the first to detect, track, and determine the orbits of all types of earth-orbiting satellites, space vehicles, and other orbiting objects.

Launched, June 22, 1960, SOLRAD-I was the first orbiting astronomical observatory in the world to study the Sun's effects on the Earth. Shrouded in secrecy for nearly 40 years, the SOLRAD payload also encapsulated the world’s first electronic intelligence (ELINT) instrumentation for Cold War reconnaissance. Originally named Tattletale, the program became operationally referred to as GRAB (Galactic Radiation and Background) after public disclosure of the project.

NRL’s Jerome Karle and Herbert Hauptman were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1985 for devising direct methods of determining complex crystal structures by using X-ray diffraction analysis. Karle, building on this work, developed methods that led to the analysis and publication of the molecular structures of many thousands of complicated molecules annually. This methodology has enabled the characterization of potent toxins, antitoxins, heart drugs, antibiotics, anti-addictive substances, anticarcinogens, anti-malarials, and explosives and propellants.

Clementine was a fast-paced technology demonstration mission jointly sponsored by the DOD and NASA that launched January 25, 1994. The design, development, and operation of the Clementine spacecraft and ground system were performed by NRL and comprised an amazing feat of science and engineering. Developed in less than two years, it had a profound e¬ ect on space missions and lunar science.

NRL's Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite launched December 2, 1995. LASCO is made up of three coronagraphs (C1, C2, and C3) and observes the corona of the Sun from SOHO. The instrument saw first light on December 29, 1995, and has been taking coronal data all day, every day since May 15, 1996, when it reached stable orbit.

Launched January 6, 2003, the Navy’s Windsat radiometer on the U.S. Air Force's Coriolis mission opened the door to a new future in metrological observations and forecasting in support of civil and military weather science. Windsat supports a broad range of Naval missions including ship movement and positioning, aircraft carrier operations, aircraft deployment, effective weapons use, underway replenishment, and littoral operations. Windsat also aids with forecasting short-term weather phenomenon for issuing timely weather warnings and gathering general climate data. WindSat has far exceeded its projected life span and continues to remain operational.

CT-Analyst, short for Contaminant Transport Analyst, is an NRL-developed tool that provides accurate, instantaneous, 3D predictions of chemical, biological, and radiological (CBR) agent transport in urban settings. CT-Analyst uses the best computations possible prepared well ahead of time and captures their salient results in a highly compressed database to be manipulated and displayed instantly. The accuracy of full 3D fluid dynamics simulations with meter-scale resolution is placed at the fingertips of first-responders and emergency managers, in a visual, easy-to-comprehend form with zero time delay.

First fired March 6, 2007 at a magnitude of 0.5 megajoules NRL's Materials Testing Facility demonstrated, Oct.31, 2011, the one-thousandth successful firing of its Electromagnetic Railgun. A railgun is a form of single turn linear motor. Magnetic fields generated by high currents driven in parallel conductors — rails — accelerate a sliding conductor, known as an armature, between the rails. A megajoule is a measurement of kinetic energy associated with a mass traveling at a certain velocity. In simple terms, a one-ton vehicle moving at 100 mph has approximately one megajoule of kinetic energy.

Developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Marine Meteorology Division located in Monterey, California, the Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) entered the Coupled Oceanographic and Atmospheric Mesoscale Prediction System-Tropical Cyclone (COAMPS-TC) into full-scale operations, June 6, 2013.

Launched August 2018, NRL’s Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, is the only imaging instrument aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission to make observations of the outer corona of the Sun. By the end of its seven-year-long mission, the spacecraft will have circled the Sun a total of 24 times.