This thesis has been developed in continuity with the curricular internship at the Microsatellites and Space Microsystems Laboratory at the University of Bologna. At this facility, the development of a Cubesat has recently been initiated, and its payload will be a GPS receiver. The mission's objective is to test the functionality of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components for the creation of low-cost GNSS receivers for real-time orbital determination and autonomous navigation.

This thesis explores aspects not yet addressed, related to the processing of scientific data both from the payload and the ground station. The tools used to simulate the two scenarios are MATLAB and RTKLib, respectively. The main objectives include estimating the minimum achievable error in position and velocity determination using simple least squares-based algorithms in MATLAB, and verifying the accuracy achievable through post-processing on RTKLib. The University of Bologna has previously participated in the ESEO mission, creating a GPS receiver for purposes similar to those of the current project. Simulation data from the ESEO receiver using SPIRENT software serves as the starting point for the subsequent analysis.

Forlì, 4 October 2018

Supervisor: Prof. Alfredo Locarini