(Redirected from U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)
Bust of
Thomas Edison at the front gate of the Naval Research Laboratory.
The 'United States Naval Research Laboratory' (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the
United States Navy and the
United States Marine Corps and conducts a broad program of scientific research and advanced development. NRL has existed since 1923, when it opened under the
Office of Naval Research at the instigation of
Thomas Edison.
"The Government should maintain a great research laboratory.... In this could be developed...all the technique of
military and
naval progression without any vast expense."
NRL's accomplishments range from the development of
gamma-ray radiography and
radar to the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) and
Dragon Eye, a robotic airborne sensor system. The laboratory first proposed a
nuclear submarine in 1939, and developed over-the-horizon radar in the late 1950s. The details of
Grab I, deployed by NRL as the nation's first
intelligence satellite, were recently declassified. The laboratory is responsible for the
identification, friend or foe (IFF) system. In 1985, two scientists at the laboratory,
Herbert A. Hauptman and
Jerome Karle, won the
Nobel Prize for work in molecular structure analysis. The projects developed by the laboratory often become mainstream applications without public awareness of the developer; an example in computer science is
onion routing. The
Timation system, developed at NRL, provided the basis for the
Global Positioning System [1].
A few of the laboratory's many current specialties include
plasma physics,
space physics,
materials science, and tactical
electronic warfare.
See also
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History of radar
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Nike laser
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Interactive Scenario Builder
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NRLMSISE-00
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SIMDIS
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Clementine_spacecraft
External links
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U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
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''Pushing the Horizon: 75 years of High Stakes Science and Technology at the Naval Research Laboratory'' (PDF)