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NASA UAVSAR image of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, collected June 23, 2010. The oil appears much darker than the surrounding seawater in the greyscale image. This is because the oil smoothes the sea surface and reduces its electrical conductivity, causing less radar energy to bounce back to the UAVSAR antenna. Additional processing of the data by the UAVSAR team produced the two inset color images, which reveal the variability of the oil spill's characteristics, from thicker, concentrated emulsions (shown in reds and yellows) to minimal oil contamination (shown in greens and blues). Dark blues correspond to areas of clear seawater bordering the oil slick.

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has captured these first, focused views of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy in high-energy X-ray light.

NRL scientists successfully used graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice (gray), as a tunnel barrier to electrically inject spin polarized electrons from a ferromagnetic NiFe contact (red) into a silicon substrate (purple). The net spin accumulation in the silicon produces a voltage, which can be directly measured. Spin injection, manipulation and detection are the fundamental elements allowing information processing with the electron spin rather than its charge.

This artist's impression of one of the most distant, oldest, brightest quasars ever seen is hidden behind dust. The quasar dates back to less than one billion years after the big bang. The dust is also hiding the view of the underlying galaxy of stars that the quasar is presumably embedded in.

By observing the sun in a number of different wavelengths, NASA's telescopes can tease out different aspects of events on the sun. These four images of a solar flare on Oct. 22, 2012, show from the top left, and moving clockwise: light from the sun in the 171 Angstrom wavelength, which shows the structure of loops of solar material in the sun's atmosphere, the corona; light in 335 Angstroms, which highlights light from active regions in the corona; a magnetogram, which shows magnetically active regions on the sun; light in the 304 Angstrom wavelength, which shows light from the region of the sun's atmosphere where flares originate.

Using ARTIDIS to feel the tissue structure of a tumor biopsy by a nanometer-sized atomic force microscope tip