2003 Winners: Bradford W. Parkinson and Ivan A. Getting
For their technological achievements in the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Biographies
Bradford W. Parkinson was born in Wisconsin in 1935. He received his bachelor degree in general engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1957, and his master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT in 1961. In 1966, he received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in aeronautics and astronautics. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1957 to 1978, retiring as a colonel. In 1973, Parkinson was appointed program director for the U.S. Department of Defense's joint military program to coordinate advanced navigation systems being developed separately by the Navy, Air Force, and other services. Parkinson is the recipient of many awards for his accomplishments, including the IEEE Sperry Award,and NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal, and has been inducted into the NASA Hall of Fame.
Parkinson joined Stanford University in 1984 as an aeronautics and astronautics professor, where he continued to research new and innovative ways to take advantage of the GPS technology’s extraordinary centimeter-level accuracy capability. He became Professor Emeritus in 2001. He is a member of several associations and committees including AAS, IEEE, The Presidential Commission on Air Safety and Security, and The Royal Institute of Navigation.
Ivan A. Getting was born on January 18, 1912 in New York City. An Edison scholar, he earned his B.S. in physics from MIT in 1933. He attended Oxford University as a graduate Rhodes Scholar and earned his D.Phil. in astrophysics in 1935. Ivan Getting's scientific career began in 1935 at Harvard University. As Harvard Fellow, his research involved cosmic rays and nuclear physics. During World War II, he served as the director of the Division of Fire Control and Army Radar at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, where he oversaw the development of the SCR-584, the world's first automatic microwave-tracking gunfire-control radar. Getting served as a professor at MIT from 1945 until 1950, when he left the university to become the vice president in charge of research and engineering at the Raytheon Company.
Before his death in 2003, Getting had received numerous prestigious honors and awards, including the President’s Medal of Merit, Air Force Exceptional Service Award, the Kitty Hawk Award, and the John Fritz Medal. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
GPS
The Global Positioning System, or GPS, is a system of satellite-based transmitters that allows anyone with a receiver (and appropriate software) to determine his or her exact position on Earth. The 31 active satellites in the system are arranged along six orbital paths in such a way that at least six satellites are visible from any point on Earth at all times. Each satellite constantly broadcasts microwave signals that indicate that unit’s speed and position, as well as the time the message was sent (as determined by extremely accurate clocks onboard each satellite). From this information, software in the receiver can precisely determine the distance to each satellite it sees; and by combining the information from four or more satellites, it can determine the user’s location.
