<p>Stanford University's Bradford Parkinson, a pioneer of the navigation technology that now guides everything from military missiles to misguided motorists, was honored Tuesday with the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the engineering equivalent of the Nobel Prize.</p>
<p>Parkinson, a 68-year-old Stanford emeritus professor of aeronautics and astronautics, was instrumental in creating the Global Positioning System, which harnesses the power of 24 orbiting satellites to pinpoint the longitude and latitude of virtually any spot on earth.</p>