Designed and built almost in its entirety by postgraduate students from the University of Stellenbosch, SUNSAT-1 heralds South Africa's entry into the Space Age.

It was launched in early 2000.

SUNSAT is a low earth orbit (LEO) micro satellite, weighing 64 kg, with dimensions of 45 cm x 45 cm x 60 cm.

It will follow an elliptical polar orbit of between 620 km to 850 km above the earth's surface and will circle the globe approximately once every 100 minutes at a travelling speed of nearly 7.5 km/s, or 27000 km/h

The primary purpose of SUNSAT is to take low cost, high resolution photographs of South Africa.

By analysing the spectral contents of these images, the type and density of vegetation on the ground can be determined. This information should be of benefit to both the forestry and agricultural industries.

A high resolution camera, also referred to as a pushbroom imager, has been developed by the university in conjunction with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and will form the main payload of SUNSAT. It operates like a fax machine and can take 3-colour stereo images (in green, red and near-infrared) with a width of 3456 pixels and a resolution of 15 m per pixel at an altitude of 800 km.

The types and quality of images that SUNSAT hopes to produce promises to be exceptional for such a low cost university micro satellite and should approach that of large and expensive commercial satellites like SPOT and LANDSAT. The camera design has, in fact, been so successful that Korea and South Africa have already signed a technology co-operation agreement which will allow Korea to use a similar camera on board their next KITSAT-3 satellite.