(1566) Icarus

(1566) Icarus is an asteroid belonging to the Apollo asteroids discovered by Walter Baade on June 27, 1949 from the Mount Palomar observatory, United States.

Designation and name

Icarus was initially designated as 1949 MA. It was later named after Icarus, a character from Greek mythology.

Project Icarus

Project Icarus was carried out during the spring of 1967. It was a mission led by Professor Paul Sandorff and his group of systems engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose objective was to design a form to divert or destroy the asteroid (1566) Icarus using rockets, in the event that at some point its ordinary course turns towards planet Earth with the consequent collision Time magazine published an article in June 1967 and the following year the results of the team published a book.

The report later served as inspiration for the script for the 1979 science fiction-disaster film Meteor.

Orbital characteristics

Icarus orbits at an average distance of 1.078 AU from the Sun, being able to move away up to 1.969 AU and approach up to 0.1865 AU. Its orbital inclination is 22.83° and its eccentricity is 0.827. It takes 408.8 days to complete an orbit around the Sun and belongs to the group of potentially dangerous asteroids.

Icarus is one of the few bodies that surpasses the interior of the orbit of Mercury, approaching the Sun twice as much as Mercury and five times as much as Earth. At this point, its sunlit surface receives 25 times more heat and radiation than Earth. The eccentricity of its orbit takes it beyond the orbit of Mars.