See Asteroid Icarus Wing By Earth This Week

Ignoring his father's warning, Icarus falls from the sky and plunges to his death in this 17th-century painting by Jacob Peter Gowry

Ya burnt! That would probably be today's cheeky reaction to Icarus's ill-fated flight. In theGreek myth, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, attempt to flee Crete by building wings of wax and feathers. On departing, Daedalus cautions his son to fly neither too low above the sea nor too high, lest the Sun melt the wax and cause the wings to fall apart. Icarus gets caught up in the thrill of flying and ignores his father's warning. When the wax melts, he plunges to his death in the sea.

The overly confident son may have passed on, but his asteroid namesake, 1566 Icarus, lives. It was discovered by none other than Walter Baade (of Baade's Window fame) on June 27, 1949, at Palomar Observatory in California.

In what has to be one of the most fitting names ever given an asteroid, Icarus was chosen because it passes close enough to the Sun that any imagined feathers and wax would have long ago burned away in the ferocious heat. With one of the closest perihelion distances known — just 20 solar diameters, or 17.4 million miles — the 0.9-mile-wide (1.4 km) asteroid gets cooked to nearly 1000°F (526°C)!

1566 Icarus is an Earth-crossing Apollo asteroid that makes close approaches to Earth in the month of June at intervals of 9, 19, and 28 years. This week's will be its closest approach since 1968.
Software Bisque - The Sky / Gianluca Masi

This week it makes one of its rare close approaches of Earth at a distance of 5 million miles, the closest it's been since June 14, 1968, when it passed just 3.8 million miles away.

Closest approach occurs today (June 16) around 10:39 a.m. Central Daylight Time. Tonight, the asteroid will only shine as bright as magnitude +13.9, but it's well-placed in a moonless sky in Canes Venatici, off the Big Dipper's Handle. Over the following evenings, it moves southward across Coma Berenices and Bootes and brightens to magnitude +13.5. The charts below show detailed positions for June 16-19, but Icarus remains brighter than magnitude +14 through the first day of summer.

The asteroid Icarus zips from Canes Venatici through Bootes over the next several nights. It will be well-placed in the evening sky at the end of twilight for viewing in 8-inch or larger telescopes. Click this map and the others below for larger versions. North is up in all maps.
Chris Marriott's SkyMap

For the next couple days, the asteroid will be moving at about 3/4° per hour, making its motion across the star field obvious within a few minutes at medium magnification. When seeking a relatively fast and faint moving object like Icarus, give yourself plenty of time to identify the star field it's expected to pass through at a selected time, then lie in wait for it to appear. The eye can quickly identify an interloper, particularly one moving at a reasonably fast clip.

This detailed view shows the hourly positions of Icarus starting at 10 p.m. CDT, June 16. Stars plotted to magnitude +14.
Chris Marriott's SkyMap

Icarus was the first asteroid to be observed using radar during that close 1968 apparition. Based on data gleaned from bouncing radio waves off the object, as well as conventional visual observations, we know it spins rapidly with a period of 2.27 hours and exhibits small changes in brightness amounting to +0.2 magnitude over a rotation period. Reflectance spectra place Icarus among the relatively rare Q-class inner belt asteroids with a composition of olivine, pyroxene, and iron-nickel — a good match for ordinary chondrites, which make up the bulk of the stony meteorites found on Earth.