Italian Startup Says a Satellite Tracked Its Own Position, With No New Hardware
An Italian startup says it has moved precise orbit determination, the job of pinning down exactly where a spacecraft is, onto the satellite itself. NaviGate, a spinoff of Sapienza University of Rome, announced on Sept. 30, 2026, that its NaviCode Caravel software ran on the onboard computer of a D-Orbit ION Satellite Carrier already in orbit, computing its position in real time from the satellite navigation receiver already aboard, with no added hardware.
NaviGate says the aim is to take work away from the ground. Working out where a satellite is now depends on dedicated infrastructure, flight dynamics specialists and repeated passes over ground stations, and the company says that becomes a cost and a delay as constellations grow. It says the software also predicts where the satellite will be next, so the spacecraft can schedule its own station contacts.
Every accuracy figure in NaviGate's announcement comes from the company's own measurement of its own product, and no independent evaluation has been published. The company reports a best-case formal uncertainty of 5.2 centimeters, its own estimate of the error, with averages across the runs in the decimeter range, using GPS measurements alone. It says it then checked those onboard solutions against reference orbits reconstructed on the ground with GODOT, the European Space Agency's flight dynamics software, and found them consistent.
The demonstration ran in two stages through D-Orbit's Software In-Orbit Demonstration service. Caravel was first checked on a ground model built to mimic the computer it would run on in flight, then uploaded to an ION carrier already in orbit, where it processed real flight telemetry across several runs.
"Satellites still depend heavily on the ground to know exactly where they are and where they will be," said Andrea Sesta, NaviGate's chief technology officer and co-founder. He called the flight result "a real milestone for the whole NaviGate team."
NaviGate, incorporated in 2026 and backed by the Italian aerospace technology transfer hub Galaxia, says it is now in talks with constellation operators and mission integrators about first pilot deployments. No customer has been named.
