It was located in the Paul Wild Observatory, 20 km west of Narrabri town in New South Wales, Australia.

SUSI was initially proposed by Australian astronomer John Davis in 1985, who led the project through to completion in 1993 and past his retirement in 1996 until his death in 2010.

[1] From then until its closure in 2017 it was led by Peter Tuthill, and used as a test facility for instruments for the CHARA Array.

The interferometer had several siderostats, which collected and reflected starlight into the optical laboratory for interferometry via two vacuum pipes.

With beam-combining instruments that operated at visible wavelengths (~550-850 nm), SUSI had an angular resolution of up to ~0.7mas (milliarcseconds).