page_title: Edwards Air Force Base
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Edwards Air Force Base / Geography
context_page_description: Edwards Air Force Base is a United States Air Force installation located in Kern County in Southern California, about 22 miles northeast of Lancaster, 15 miles east of Rosamond and 5.5 miles south of California City.
  It is the home of the Air Force Test Center, Air Force Test Pilot School, and NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center. It is the Air Force Materiel Command center for conducting and supporting research and development of flight, as well as testing and evaluating aerospace systems from concept to combat. It also hosts many test activities conducted by America's commercial aerospace industry.
  Notable occurrences at Edwards include Chuck Yeager's flight that broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, test flights of the North American X-15, the first landings of the Space Shuttle, and the 1986 around-the-world flight of the Rutan Voyager.
context_section_description: The largest features of the 470 square miles (1,200 km²) that make up Edwards AFB are the Rogers Lake and Rosamond Lake dry lakes. These have served as emergency and scheduled landing sites for many aerospace projects including the Bell X-1, Lockheed U-2, Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, and the Space Shuttle. The lakebeds have black lines painted on them to mark seven official "runways". Also painted on the dry lake beds near Dryden is the world's largest compass rose: 2,000-foot (610 m) radius, 4,000 feet (0.76 mi; 1.22 km) in diameter. The Edwards AFB compass rose's magnetic declination to true north is measured by Google Earth's distance/direction measurement tool as inclined to magnetic north with a 15.3 degrees east variance of true north, as opposed to the current variance of 12.4 degrees east (2014.) This is consistent with a calculated magnetic variance at this location in the early 1960s. The larger lake bed, Rogers, encompasses 44 square miles (110 km²) of desert. Because of Rogers' history in the space program, it was declared a National Historic Landmark.
  The Rosamond dry lake bed encompasses 21 square miles (54 km²) and is also used for emergency landings and other flight research roles. By August, the lake bed is dry and rough from the weather and from high performance aircraft performing landings. Both lake beds are some of the lowest points in the Antelope Valley and they can collect large amounts of precipitation. Desert winds whip this seasonal water around on the lake beds and the process polishes them, yielding a new, extremely flat surface; the Rosamond lake bed was measured to have an altitude deviation of 18 inches (460 mm) over a 30,000-foot (9,100 m) length; that's about 1 millimetre (0.039 in) altitude deviation over every 20 metres (66 ft) of length.
  The census-designated place encompasses an area of 44.38 square kilometres (17.1 sq mi) of which 0.173 hectares (0.43 acres) is water.
caption: The world's largest compass rose is painted on the lake bed beside NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center.
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