• moon
• CubeSat
• Telecommunications
• Thermal control
• attitude control
• spread spectrum

The Moon is the only natural satellite of the Earth and has raised the interest of scientific exploration for the longest time. Many missions have flown to the Moon in the past and, in recent years, the possibility to use the Moon as a human outpost to simplify missions to outer space has increased the numbers of missions planned to fly in the years 2030+. The higher number of planned missions create the need of a telecommunication service capable of sustaining and simplifying the designs of lunar vehicles. In this thesis, after an analysis of the existing communication relay between Earth and Moon, it is studied the possibility to set up a constellation of CubeSats to allow IoT communications on the Moon surface.
Different orbits are compared to find the best solution to guarantee continuous-24h service on the whole surface.
After the calculation of the interference that the constellation causes at the terminals, the power needed to receive and send data simultaneously to 48 user is calculated.
The same procedure is repeated to find the number of relay satellites needed to connect the CubeSats to Earth and finally a preliminary design of a 6U CubeSat is performed, by selecting all the instruments necessary for the mission success.