First steps

First, we need to see every part of our goal in detail.

There should be a parallel action around that. We cannot wait for every one of them to shape.

Our first and crucial step involves developing an FPGA board, a critical component that controls and commands other instruments within the system. 

LAUNCHER:

• It's crucial to understand and plan for NASA's launching limits. Early planning and a robust setup are essential. We must be mindful of the formal licensing requirements, such as RF band and remote licensing, and the necessary tests, like vibration testing. This will ensure that the CubeSat can demonstrate a smooth deployable release.
• A lot of USA travel is needed, so we plan to find alternative options instead of thinking about NASA and travelling to the USA. 
• There are alternative launchers available; check this post about where to launch.

Let's prepare our board after learning about the launch and what is needed.

I have already started looking into the FPGA we can use; it should be low-power. I have already purchased the Cyclone V dev board DE10-Nano. It's a good board, and it is not too expensive. 

GNSS:

We aim to incorporate a GNSS unit on the board. Moving GNSS or GPS into space is challenging, and we must ensure the unit is space-worthy. To achieve this, we will build a GNSS unit.

The board will have an RF front and connect to FPGA for correlators.

The main component nominated for the RF front is STA5635A. It is a good choice since a fully integrated GNSS RF front-end supports different bands (L1, L2, L5, L6 and L) with a programmable and flexible RF-IF chain driven by a fractional PLL. In particular, G5RF can manage all the GNSS constellations that are available and planned for the future, like GPS, Galileo, Glonass, BeiDou, IRNSS, and QZSS.

The board design is progressing to create a board to connect to the GPIO of the DE10-Nano.

The antenna detection can help with fault and connection detection.

Once the board is ready, we must program it and read the values. We can work on the GPS coming in SPI and then on other constellations. 

RealTime PROCESSING (RT)

We have an SoC core for our future GPS onboard. It enables us to program our mission using a computer and FPGA combined.

I am familiar with RT-Linux applications. 

RTLinux is a complex real-time real-time operating system (RTOS) microkernel that runs the entire Linux operating system as a fully preemptive process.

As far as I know, we need to use something like RTEMS.

Since Cyclone V has a Linux that can work with the peripherals, we need to see how Linux LXDE Desktop (kernel 4.5) 

can be empowered for that purpose.