May 24 (Reuters) - NASA's latest mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope ended on Sunday with the 53rd landing of a U.S. space shuttle at Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert.
Following are some key facts about the historic military installation.
-- Edwards, occupying about 640 square miles (1,657 sq km) of desert and located about 85 miles (136.8 km) north of Los Angeles, is home to the U.S. Air Force Flight Test Center and test pilot school.
-- The base is named for test pilot Glen Edwards, who was killed with four other crew members in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber at the base in June 1948.
-- Nearly every U.S. military aircraft since the 1950s has been at least partially tested at Edwards, where numerous aviation records have been set and broken.
-- Legendary U.S. test pilot Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier at Edwards, which at the time was named Muroc Army Air Field, in a flight of the experimental Bell X-1 jet in October 1947.
-- The shuttle Atlantis touched down on the base's main landing strip, a 3-mile (4.8-km)-long paved runway designated 22-04. The base has two other paved runways, plus a total of nine more marked landing strips on two immense dry lake beds whose hard, flat, clay surfaces provide ideal landing locations for aircraft.
-- Edwards originally was the primary landing site for NASA's shuttle program before the space agency built a landing facility for the orbiters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
(Compiled by Steve Gorman at Edwards Air Force Base, California; Editing by Will Dunham)
((For shuttle story see)) Keywords: SPACE SHUTTLE/ (steve.gorman@thomsonreuters.com; +1 213-955-6761) COPYRIGHT Copyright Thomson Reuters 2009. All rights reserved. The copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters.
Following are some key facts about the historic military installation.
-- Edwards, occupying about 640 square miles (1,657 sq km) of desert and located about 85 miles (136.8 km) north of Los Angeles, is home to the U.S. Air Force Flight Test Center and test pilot school.
-- The base is named for test pilot Glen Edwards, who was killed with four other crew members in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber at the base in June 1948.
-- Nearly every U.S. military aircraft since the 1950s has been at least partially tested at Edwards, where numerous aviation records have been set and broken.
-- Legendary U.S. test pilot Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier at Edwards, which at the time was named Muroc Army Air Field, in a flight of the experimental Bell X-1 jet in October 1947.
-- The shuttle Atlantis touched down on the base's main landing strip, a 3-mile (4.8-km)-long paved runway designated 22-04. The base has two other paved runways, plus a total of nine more marked landing strips on two immense dry lake beds whose hard, flat, clay surfaces provide ideal landing locations for aircraft.
-- Edwards originally was the primary landing site for NASA's shuttle program before the space agency built a landing facility for the orbiters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
(Compiled by Steve Gorman at Edwards Air Force Base, California; Editing by Will Dunham)
((For shuttle story see)) Keywords: SPACE SHUTTLE/ (steve.gorman@thomsonreuters.com; +1 213-955-6761) COPYRIGHT Copyright Thomson Reuters 2009. All rights reserved. The copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters.