In recent years, interest in missions to the surface of the Moon has been going through a renaissance not seen since the Apollo era. An important consideration for such missions is how to accurately determine the position of objects on the Moon. In addition, mission components should have an understanding of a reference time in order to correlate measurements and plan actions. Currently, these capabilities are provided using different methods on a mission-by-mission basis. As this is inefficient compared to the use of a common approach, there are plans for a satellite constellation providing navigation and timing information, similar to satellite-based systems used for these purposes on Earth. However, a lunar equivalent is expected to have a smaller scale, which leads to a reduced accuracy and availability compared to terrestrial satellite navigation systems.

In this context, suggestions have been made for combining a satellite navigation system with swarm navigation, in which entities of a swarm perform measurements between one another in order to estimate their position and clock parameters relative to one another. The goal of such a system is to complement the satellite navigation system with the higher availability and accuracy of the swarm navigation system. In this thesis, we propose and implement such a combined system, which we refer to as a hybrid navigation system. Based on a previous theoretical analysis, we implement a simulation to generate test data and use this data to evaluate our hybrid navigation system’s performance in various scenarios. As a swarm is a distributed system, we describe different algorithms which can be used by the hybrid navigation system in such an environment and evaluate their characteristics. Finally, we note practical considerations relevant for use of a hybrid navigation system and use cases in which such a system may provide benefits compared to satellite navigation only.