(Image source: European Space Agency)

BY STEVEN SPARKMAN

ANCHOR CHRISTY LEWIS

You're watching multisource science video news analysis from Newsy. 

There’s too much junk in space. That’s the major finding of a new report by the National Research Council. The head author is retired NASA scientist Donald Kessler. ABC Australia reports -- Kessler has been warning about the dangers of space debris since 1978.

“That’s when he first argued there’ll come a point when there is so much debris in orbit that any collision could cause a cascade, where each successive collision would cause more collisions and an ever-increasing amount of debris. That could render the use of satellites -- and indeed space exploration itself -- unfeasible for generations.” (Video source: European Space Agency)

The new report says that point has nearly arrived--even after a decade of space agencies attempting to control their litter. Some computer simulations show the snowballing of space debris is already underway.

But Nature News reports two recent incidents made the problem much worse.

“In 2007, China used an anti-satellite missile to blow upa weather satellite, creating about 150,000 particles larger than one centimeter. Two years later, an accidental collisionbetween two satellites added to the mess. Taken together, the two events more than doubled the amount of fragmentation debris in Earth orbit...”

At the moment, space agencies can track a half-million objects at least one centimeter in diameter. These include old satellites, spent rocket stages, lost astronaut tools, and even paint chips. All of them are moving at such high speed -- getting hit by one has the force of an exploding hand grenade.

An analyst tells BBC a few of the suggested ways to get the problem under control.

ROBERT MASSEY: “There are various ideas in place. You’ve heard about things like ‘laser brooms’ -- really quite exotic-sounding things -- great, big magnetic nets. But I think actually, fundamentally one thing we have to tackle is the idea of not producing so much of this stuff in the first place.”

The report urges NASA to start taking cleanup seriously. There are technical and legal hurdles before any plans can get off the ground, and NASA and the State Department are best situated to clear them. A writer for io9 speaks for all space fans, saying -- the sooner the better.

“Regardless of your stance on the severity of space debris in its current state, can we all just agree to not screw the pooch on this one? I, for one, would hate to see the progress of projects like deep space exploration impeded by the fact that we can't safely leave our own orbit.”

Back in February, Japan announced its own plans to send up a giant magnified net to sweep up debris.

Transcript by Newsy.