Australian engineers are working on a laser to shoot at space junk clogging up the area around Earth.

A growing amount of redundant satellites, casings, rocket parts and other random debris is really starting to pile up in the Earth’s orbit, and experts say a cascade of collisions could be set off at any moment.

Matthew Colless, director of Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said he and his team are leaping headlong into the laser project, as we may be just a few years from a nasty impact.

“It’s important that it’s possible on that scale because there’s so much space junk up there,” Dr Colless told the Guardian.

“We’re perhaps only a couple of decades away from a catastrophic cascade of collisions ... that takes out all the satellites in low orbit,” he said.

Estimates say there are around 300,000 pieces of unnecessary space junk drifting around above the planet.

Australia currently has a contract with NASA to track space junk with an infra-red laser telescope at the Mount Stromlo Observatory. Now, researchers will work on better lasers, still only for tracking, until they work up to a device capable of actually moving the chunks of astro-trash out of the way.

“There’s no risk of missing and hitting a working satellite,” Colless said.

“We can target them precisely. We really don’t miss.”

The futuristic device will be helped along by the establishment of a dedicated Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), from $20 million in government funding and $40 million in private investment.

The space laser CRC has been funded and will be contributed to by several universities as well as companies including Lockheed Martin, Optus and EOS Space System Australia.

The following visualisation shows the cloud of junk encapsulating the Earth;