BusanSat

BusanSat [Nara Space]

BusanSat is a South Korean 12U-CubeSat manufactured by Nara Space Technologies for Busan Metropolitan City. The satellite was developed to perform ocean and atmospheric observations, focusing on marine fine dust and thin cloud monitoring over the Yellow Sea, Busan Port, the West Sea coast, and parts of the Pacific Ocean.

The mission was planned over approximately seven years as South Korea’s first municipal ocean-observation microsatellite project. Busan Metropolitan City intends to use the satellite’s data for marine environmental management, atmospheric monitoring, fine dust policy support, and climate-change research. The mission is also supported through cooperation with the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and the NASA Langley Research Center under a joint utilization agreement signed in March 2024.

BUSANSAT was integrated and manufactured by Nara Space, which provided both the spacecraft bus and overall system integration. The satellite uses the company’s proprietary Highly Adaptive Platform, a modular microsatellite bus intended to support a wide range of payloads and mission environments. The successful launch and commissioning demonstrated the platform’s applicability for commercial Earth-observation and scientific research missions.

The spacecraft has a mass of approximately 12.4 kg and follows the 12U CubeSat form factor. Its primary payload is a polarimetric observation camera operating at wavelength bands of 410 nm, 550 nm, and 864 nm. The instrument performs daily polarimetric observations over the Yellow Sea to measure fine dust particles and thin cloud layers in the marine atmosphere. It has a spatial resolution of 388 m and a field of view of 98 × 98 km. The satellite is designed to provide atmospheric and ocean-environment data suitable for scientific analysis, public environmental management, and marine-data industrial applications.

The spacecraft was launched aboard a Falcon-9 v1.2 (Block 5) from Vandenberg Space Force Base on 3 July 2026 and successfully established two-way communications after orbital insertion.