Let's look at pictures first, before getting into the nitty gritty of U.S. Air Force project management.
Putting a B-2 through its paces at 90° North
This is a beautiful photo of a beautiful B-2 Spirit approaching the North Pole.
Testing B-2 performance at a geomagnetic extreme point |
The US Air Force provides some details about this test flight:
A B-2 Spirit flies to the North Pole on October 27, 2011, on a test mission from Edwards Air Force Base, California. The polar flight helped ensure that the B-2 maintains its combat capability in all environments...
The North Pole's coordinates are 90° North latitude and 0° East or 0° West longitude, take your pick. (For the sake of notational accuracy, it is usually expressed as 90° North but disregard that for the moment.) Patience, please, as I am going somewhere with this.
Comfortable expedition to the North Pole thanks to Russian icebreaker (2013) |
So, 90°N 0°E is merely a "quarter" rotation of the Earth away from coordinates of 0°N 0°E according to the map projection of the World Geodetic System 1984. WGS84 is an often used global reference system for modeling the Earth. The U.S. Department of Defense and GPS (Global Positioning System) both use WGS84.
Notably, the DoD developed GPS AND made it freely available to all in the early 1980s.
Null Island is L0L0
If one is doing geocoding with GPS and WGS84, the Library of Congress describes 0°N 0°E as
"a curious blend of real and imaginary geography, of mathematical certainty and pure fantasy"