| Summary: | The paper presents a navigation experiment, successfully flown onboard BEXUS 6 balloon mission on 8th October 2008 from ESRANGE Space Center in Kiruna. Northrop Grumman Italia (NG Italia) according to multi-year collaboration plan with University of Rome “La Sapienza” has provided support to the students’ team that proposed, designed and operated the LowCoINS (Low Cost Inertial Navigation System) experiment. LowCoINS has as the main component a low-cost three-axes inertial unit, integrating three accelerometers and three gyros, together with temperature sensors, three-axes magnetometer and a pressure sensor for augmentation purposes. Measurements from the sensors are both stored onboard and downlinked to a ground station making them available for a successive post-processing. Several tests have been exploited to verify the effectiveness of the choices operated in the design phase of the unit and its capability to withstand to all the environmental requirements. The data processing included the development and execution of different sensor fusion algorithm to obtain attitude, position and velocity data throughout the entire flight. An overview of the LowCoINS design philosophy, the extensive set of environmental test performed to validate the unit and a description of the algorithm used together with the results obtained are reported hereafter.
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