The American satellite firm that has been crowdsourcing online volunteers to help scour its satellite images for visual clues as to the whereabouts of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 say that having to go through images from such a large section of ocean is slowing down the analysis of what might be debris from the disappeared jetliner.
DigitalGlobe Inc, a Colorado-based company which collects satellite imagery for the US and other governments and private corporations, confirmed that it had collected images on March 16 that appeared to show debris possibly related to Flight MH370.
The company said it provided the images to the Australian government, who released them earlier yesterday. DigitalGlobe said the Australian government only began poring over the satellite images provided to them in the last few days, after international Search and Rescue (SAR) operations had expanded to include the southern Indian Ocean and the waters near Australia.
Australian authorities cautioned that the debris in the pictures might not be related to the missing plane.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) says the search zone covers 600,000 square kilometers of ocean.
The entire search for Flight MH370 now covers an area of 7.7million square kilometers – larger than the entire land mass of Australia.
“Given the extraordinary size of the current search area, the lengthy duration of the analysis effort was to be expected,” DigitalGlobe spokesman Turner Brinton said in a statement.
Brinton declined comment on whether the debris was spotted by DigitalGlobe’s own analysts, government analysts or Internet users participating in a “crowdsourcing” effort launched by the company to help locate the plane.
Brinton said the images were captured on March 16 by the company’s Worldview-2 satellite at a resolution of about 50 cm, and the company was continuing to collect imagery over the area where the possible debris had been spotted.
DigitalGlobe said it had been collecting images over a broader area than the official search area, while focusing the efforts of its crowdsourcing volunteers on the search areas identified by authorities. “The efforts of millions of online volunteers around the world allowed us to rule out broad swaths of ocean with some certainty,” Brinton said.
See Also: Volunteers needed: help look for MH370 in satellite images, WTF: Courtney Love thinks she found Flight MH370
Story: Reuters
