Pollution is always an unstoppable menace to our world, especially in the 21st century, the bars are too high. But, how about space? is space neat enough? oops!! No.

Sources from NASA claim that at least 170 million pieces of rapidly-moving space junk are now circulating in Earth’s orbit and this debris may even lead to a “catastrophic avalanche of collisions” and destroy all working satellites and even threaten economies, Greene, a host among the international space scientists in Canberra was quoted saying, added that only 22,000 are tracked.

The Head of Australia’s Space Environment Research Centre, Ben Greene has said, “The space junk problem has been getting worse every year.”

“We’re losing three or four satellites a year now to space debris collision. We’re very close, NASA estimates, of within five to 10 years of losing everything,” Greene said, adding that “a catastrophic avalanche of collisions which could quickly destroy all orbiting satellites is now possible.”

Later to that, he suggested that such collisions can threaten world economies, drawing an example of Australia’s dependence of satellites.

“The Australian economy is entirely dependent on space, we’re a big country with few people and the only way we can service it, whether it’s with surveillance, safety or search-and-rescue, is from space” Greene concluded.

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It is assumed that a major collision of space junk is “inevitable,” if the problem is not handled properly, space debris expert Moriba Jah from the University of Texas who joined the Canberra conference was acknowledged saying so.

“You’ve driven on the roads here when you have a lot of mist or fog, and you have to go really slow, and you just don’t know what’s really around you. That’s the perfect analogy to space right now,” Jah said.

“Any man-made object in orbit about the Earth which no longer serves a useful function,” said NASA. They further added that space junk may travel at speeds up to 27,000kph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft.”

The recent sources from the agency claimed that they tracked nearly 500,000 pieces of debris of which more than 20,000 pieces of debris are “larger than a softball orbiting the Earth.”

Meanwhile, the proper disposal of space ‘trash’ has recently become more of a concern, since simply jettisoning items out of ships has created a large amount of space junk, in February this year, NASA astronauts dumped a ton-and-a-half capsule of trash out of the ISS in what looked like the biggest instance of littering in space ever in the history.