The Kodiak GNSS Receiver for Microlaunchers and Sounding Rockets

Abstract

There have been big changes to the number and variety of Global Navigation Satellite Systems in the past decade. While commercial manufacturers have quickly provided solutions for the mass-market and high-budget missions, there is still a gap in affordable receivers specialized for microlaunchers and sounding rocket missions. Based on GSOC's experience with the Phoenix GPS receiver, which has flown on numerous sounding rockets and small satellite missions over the past decade, the Kodiak GNSS receiver has been developed. With its modu-lar design approach and source code access, the Kodiak receiver can be tailored to a specific mission while keeping the overall complexity of the system as low as possible. The receiver uses a System-on-Chip FPGA with a dual-core ARM processor. Special care has been paid to ensure the exact synchronization of ex-ternal Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) with the receiver time while the re-ceiver interfaces also allow synchronization of other sensors, for example a sun sensor. The paper provides a description of the Kodiak GNSS Receiver devel-opment and verification. It discusses the results of the rocket flight experiment and compares the Kodiak results with the performance of the other on-board sensors. Conclusions of the experiment are drawn and the planned future work is discussed.