Killer Asteroids: How Engineers Will Save the Earth

In Killer Asteroids: How Engineers Will Save the Earth, you'll learn ...

• How potentially hazardous asteroids are detected, tracked, and characterized
• The science and engineering principles used to predict asteroid trajectories and assess impact risk
• Engineering approaches that have been proposed and demonstrated to deflect asteroids

Overview

Preview a portion of this course before purchasing it.

Credit: 3 PDH

Length: 37 pages

They are out there. Killer asteroids have impacted the Earth before, and it is only a matter of time until the next impact. This course introduces engineers to the technical foundations of planetary defense - the coordinated set of scientific, engineering, and systems-level activities aimed at preventing hazardous asteroids from impacting Earth. Although asteroid impacts are rare events, their potential consequences are severe, making planetary defense a classic low-probability, high-consequence engineering problem.

The course is organized around the end-to-end defense chain: detect, track, assess, and intervene.

The course begins by explaining why asteroids matter, using historical events such as Chelyabinsk, Tunguska, and Chicxulub to illustrate hazard frequency, consequences, and uncertainty. We then review the basic properties of near-Earth objects (NEOs), including size, composition, and orbital characteristics, and how these factors influence detection and mitigation strategies.

We cover asteroid tracking and characterization, focusing on the engineering and computational methods used to determine orbits, refine impact probabilities, and manage uncertainty over long time horizons. We also look at the global effort to detect potentially hazardous asteroids, including the roles played by government agencies, research institutions, and amateur astronomers using ground-based and space-based observatories.

We then review ways of deflecting asteroids, including kinetic impactors, gravity tractors, and other concepts, with emphasis on engineering feasibility, timing constraints, and systems-level tradeoffs.

We conclude with a review of real-world missions and field trials, including successful asteroid deflection demonstrations and missions that landed on asteroids and returned samples to Earth. These case studies show how measured asteroid behavior has informed engineering models and refined assumptions about asteroid structure and response to intervention.

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• Basic properties and classifications of near-Earth objects (NEOs)
• Methods used to detect asteroids using optical and infrared sensors
• Engineering principles behind asteroid tracking, orbit determination, and impact prediction
• How orbital characteristics (eccentricity, inclination, encounter geometry, and discovery geometry) influence detection limits, impact velocities, and feasible mitigation timelines
• Physical characterization techniques and why asteroid composition and structure matter
• Proposed and demonstrated methods of asteroid deflection and mitigation technologies
• How asteroid impact risk is evaluated using probability–consequence hazard frameworks
• Planetary defense as an integrated detect–track–assess–intervene process, including key dependencies, bottlenecks, and failure modes that affect overall risk reduction
• Lessons learned from asteroid rendezvous, deflection, and sample-return missions

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 25 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.