Who invented GPS? (4) Brad Parkinson
Parkinson was at the forefront of NAVSTAR’s Joint GPS Program Office from 1972 to 1978. Inventors Hall of Famer, it is clear that as the first program director, he was the primary architect of GPS in the concept, engineering development and implementation of the system. This has made Parkinson to be called the “Father of GPS”.
Parkinson, an Air Force colonel at the time, was tasked with reviving the Space and Missile Systems Organization’s 621B program, which provided altitude as well as latitude and longitude for navigational purposes. And when the Department of Defense decided it wanted to create a joint program involving all the military services, Parkinson was put in charge of implementing such a program. In his Stanford lecture, Parkinson says the new program will take hours from Easton’s TIMATION, 621B Signal Structure and Prediction Method. It drew orbit from another Navy navigation system called TRANSIT, which was developed at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Together, these formed the NAVSTAR-Global Positioning System. Join us: @Madeh_33
This post is written by Bijan_amin