History
The story of ICARUS
The history of ICARUS is a story of how one project opened the door to a new and more complex understanding of life on our planet.
And it started with a crazy question.
ORIGIN
In the beginning, studying animal movement was limited to a few snapshots in a wild animal’s life.
Before there were receivers in orbiting Earth that could collect data from tagged small animals continuously over their lifetimes from wherever they roamed—in other words, before there was ICARUS—studying animal movement was limited to a few snapshots in a wild animal’s life.
For more than 30 years, the team around Martin Wikelski, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, has studied wild animals by understanding their movements: where they live, with whom they travel, and how they behave. Their research has taken them on the trail of animals far and wide—from migrating dragonflies on the New Jersey coast to towering giraffes in Kruger National Park. However, understanding the behavior of most wild animals over longer periods was only possible by drawing conclusions from a series of snapshots.
Wikelski and his team established ICARUS (the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) to allow scientists all over the world to continuously and simultaneously track the collective movements of wild creatures of almost all sizes, over the course of their lifetimes, using tracking devices that can run on solar energy and that will soon weigh less than one gram. Each tag collects data on its wearer’s position, physiology, and microclimate, sending it to a receiver in space, which beams it back down to computers on the ground. The ICARUS project represents a paradigm shift in biology opening the possibility to new and more complex scientific inquiry.
MOTIVATION
For Wikelski and his team, it was clear that shedding light on these black spots required a radical rethinking of how animals are tracked.
Until now, animal tracking was cumbersome. A scientist would tag an animal by putting a numbered band around a bird’s leg or a larger animal’s ear. The scientist would make an assumption about where to find the animal and look for evidence to support their conclusions. If the animal was large enough, the scientist could attach a signal-emitting tag to the animal’s body and then attempt to follow it.
Wikelski remembers embarking on a frantic pursuit in a beaten-up Oldsmobile at 2 a.m. (most animals move at night) holding an antenna out the window and trying to stay close enough to capture the radio signal as the creature careened through the countryside.
Both these methods yield limited data, leaving many dark spots in the overall map of an animal’s life. These black holes make it harder to save threatened species, to understand how or from where zoonotic diseases spread, or to understand the effects of climate change.
For Wikelski, it was clear that shedding light on these black spots required a radical rethinking of how animals are tracked.
IDEA
It was Bill Cochran, one of the founding fathers of wildlife telemetry, who suggested the ingenious answer: start tracking animals from the International Space Station.
In 2001, an idea began to crystalize on the shores of the Panama Canal with a cold beer and a retired astronomer named George Swenson. Swenson was a former University of Illinois professor who was among the first American radio astronomers to track Russia’s satellite Sputnik I in 1957, and who also helped to construct the Very Large Array radio telescope.
In 2001, Wikelski invited Swenson to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where he was setting up a local radio-tracking array based on ingenious inventions by Swenson’s engineering affiliate Bill Cochran, one of the founding fathers of wild- life telemetry. After observing how Wikelski and his colleagues were studying individual species like kinkajous, ocelots, and toucans—managing to capture only instances of their behavior— Swenson and Wikelski realized that the biologists were missing the bigger picture.
If astronomers can create maps of the vast universe, pinpointing precisely where stars were disappearing or being born, why shouldn’t ecologists have a unified view for life on our own planet? To answer the big questions in ecology, Swenson suggested, ecologists had to track all of Earth’s animals—continuously, simultaneously, ubiquitously. But how?
How could we attach radio tags to animals representing the full diversity of life, including, and especially, the very small? And how might we receive and share the data being transmitted from these tags all over the globe? The answer, which began to take shape that day on the Panama Canal, would become the revolutionary wildlife tracking system now known as ICARUS.
For a start, those hand-held antennae had to go. A big-picture view of life on Earth needed a big vantage point — space. It was Bill Cochran, Swenson’s friend and one of the founding fathers of wildlife telemetry, who suggested the ingenious answer: start tracking animals from the International Space Station.
SPACE
On August 15, 2018, cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopyev installed the ICARUS antennas on the ISS during a seven-hour spacewalk.
In 2011, Wikelski and ICARUS project manager Uschi Müller, together with their team (space engineer Bernhard Doll, SpaceTech GmbH; Christoph Hohage, German Space Agency; Mikhail Belyaev, S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, Russia; Phil Hartl, German space pioneer) began to design both the receivers and a data collecting system to be attached to the International Space Station (ISS). Initially, they carried out aerial flight tests with the GTS digital clock synchronization system (Global Transmission Services, TZR Stuttgart) that also had a transmitter on the ISS. But it soon became clear that a completely new digital communication system was needed to allow the future miniaturization of animal tags for tracking songbirds and insects.
The engineers from INRADIOS GmbH, working with the highly accomplished space engineer Wolfgang Pitz (SpaceTech GmbH) created a novel IoT (Internet of Things) waveform, which was ideal for communicating small bits of vital signs of life. Of course, the energy-limited small tags on animals needed a large antenna and powerful computer on the ISS. In the words of Swenson: “You can’t beat physics.”
The Russian space agency collaborated throughout the project and agreed to launch this system and run it on their ISS module. The equipment was launched into to space on February 13, 2018 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. On August 15, 2018, cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopyev installed the ICARUS antennas on the ISS during a seven-hour spacewalk.
“Everybody said it wouldn’t fly. And today, it flew.”
In its first year of operation, the prototype system delivered datasets on dozens of species worldwide—including in difficult to reach places like over oceans, in deserts, and in rainforests.
FROM ISS to CUBE SAT
But in 2022, global geo politics stopped ICARUS’s progress mid flight. The war on Ukraine brought the ICARUS collaboration with Russia to an abrupt end. ICARUS paused operations. For the team behind the project, this pause became an opportunity to reimagine the technology from the ground up.
Working with the Munich-based NewSpace company TALOS, engineers miniaturized the ICARUS system into a ten-centimeter payload that could fly on a tiny satellite known as a CubeSat. Compared to the ISS-based prototype, the new receiver consumes one tenth the energy, reads four times as many sensors, and enables faster data downloads and remote software updates. It was successfully tested in an experimental orbital flight in 2023.
In November 2025, in Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, a rocket carrying a satellite equipped with the ICARUS receiver launches into space—opening a new chapter for ICARUS and the study of animal observation.
“ICARUS has flown back into space,” says Martin Wikelski. “And now, we have an even better view of life on Earth than before.”