French, Chinese Satellite Images May Show Malaysian Jet Debris 103
Bloomberg News reports that "French satellite scans provided fresh indications of objects adrift in part of the Indian Ocean that's being scoured for the missing Malaysian airliner, backing up Chinese evidence as more planes and ships join the hunt. ... The developments rekindled prospects for a breakthrough in the mystery of Malaysian Air (MAS) Flight 370 after radar and visual scans failed to find objects spotted in earlier images taken from space. Searchers, bolstered by a growing fleet of international vessels, also want to locate a wooden pallet seen from the air to check if it could have come from the jet's hold."
And if you have your own database of recent photos to trawl through, the article says "The Chinese photo, taken March 18, is focused 90 degrees east and almost 45 degrees south, versus almost 91 degrees east and 44 degrees south for similar items on a March 16 satellite image, putting the object 120 kilometers southwest of that sighting."
The only working complete theory (Score:0, Informative)
The following theory posted on slashdot appears to put the pieces together:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
Re:Great Headline (Score:4, Informative)
In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate. The linked article is a bad rehash of 3rd party information - it's generic mainstream "news" to sell ads to people who can't tell the difference between a well researched detailed story and a piece of abstracted reworded junk.
The sad thing.. (Score:5, Informative)
is that it could take a couple of YEARS of searching, to actually locate this aircraft and get explanations for the families to what happened. It is unrealistic to expect it to be found next week or something. It took 2 years to locate the Air France Flight 447 fuselage underwater and they had a pretty reasonable idea where it was likely to be... they found significant debris about 5 days after it went down.
I pray they find it soon (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Great Headline (Score:1, Informative)
This article has the picture released by China [nypost.com], coordinates are stamped on the picture: 90deg 13' 43" E / 44deg 57' 29" S. Those positions are now dated due to expected drift of any debris in the local currents and wind.
Here's earlier satellite photos with coordinates from DigitalGlobe, as released by the Australian search team [reuters.com] (Australian Maritime Safety Authority - AMSA).
The AMSA is coordinating the search in the southern Indian Ocean and all their AMSA news updates are here [amsa.gov.au], and images/maps are here [amsa.gov.au], including the cumulative area searched as of March 23 [amazonaws.com] [PDF].
The information is out there if you go looking.
Re:Great Headline (Score:5, Informative)
In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate.
Jup. Pretty much all reporting on this is abysmal, from painfully simplified to just plain wrong and misleading.
One thing I haven't seen correct in any non-aviation specific publication:
The aircraft didn't send pings to the Inmarsat satellite, it replied
to pings by the Inmarsat satellite. It's an important detail:
That's why we know the roundtrip times.
One of best sources - maybe even the best source - is The Aviation Herald:
Malaysia B772 over Gulf of Thailand on Mar 8th 2014, aircraft missing, high degree of certainty: deliberate action [avherald.com]
All images (including the new one) are there, all known technical information (times, positions, etc.) is there.
Updated information is highlighted with a light yellow background.
The most amazing thing: As far as I know, avherald.com is a one-man operation.