Gnss Based Attitude Determination Systems for Nanosatellites

Attitude determination systems based on global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) present several advantages, most of all, for very small satellites. GNSS receivers have low power consumption, limited mass, small volume, and are relatively inexpensive. However, if the attitude information is extracted from the relative position between two or more GNSS antennas placed on the nanosatellite, due to the small baseline between them, the achievable accuracy will not be as good as the one obtained with other high performance attitude sensors. In order to circumvent the accuracy limitation, an alternative single-antenna GNSS-based method is presented, which estimates attitude information through the use of the GNSS-derived accelerations.