Satellite photos of possible crash site of MH370

[ianlevesque]

Mirror for when Dropbox goes over bandwidth limit http://i.imgur.com/UYDAYfz.jpg

[dhimes]

Thank you. It's 1200 UTC and dropbox is hosed.

[WestCoastJustin]

Here is google maps of the lat and lng's:

https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=-43.5834,90.5737 [from 1]

https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=-44.0302,91.1327 [from 2]

Based off these images:

[1] https://photos-4.dropbox.com/t/0/AAAFoSL9yTdmE2e4_DanfiQ5uk_...

[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjJuy3QCUAAHS7s.jpg:large

[davidw]

Ok, so unless they were trying to rendezvous with the secret undersea Nazi base on the underwater volcano, it looks like the "steal the airplane" thing either was wrong entirely or went completely awry.

So I wonder how it got out there.

[jonah]

Someone's done some fairly high resolution terrain mapping in that area. Plus a small volcano.

What's the depth in that area?

[munimkazia]

I am obviously no expert, but I expected something more clearer than this. This doesn't look too different from the smudges and discoloration all over the image (are those ocean waves?)

[tom_morrow]

RAAF has gotten radar reflections off the objects in this area.

[001sky]

"P-8 has arrived in Indian Ocean area; US 7th Fleet spokesperson confirms they have located the debris identified by Australia"

Awaiting confirm on just what it is...

[uptown]

"RAAF P3 crew unable to locate debris. Cloud & rain limited visbility. Further aircraft to continue search for #MH370"

https://twitter.com/AMSA_News/status/446583054002171904

[ars]

It looks like just waves, or noise.

But I think they think it's real because it looks the same on both types of imaging, while the noise looks different between the two images.

[dsl]

This is spot on. Most geointelligence is not based on a single photo, but a series of captures (multiple passes, wavelengths, angles, etc) and looking at what has or has not changed.

US intelligence agencies already have software that does multi-capture analysis like this, and I suspect it was the original source of this "discovery." Usually it is ran on small areas of the ocean (near military seaports or choke points in waterways) or is done at lower resolution to find big objects (aircraft carriers or cargo ships). The computational workload to find a sub-60 foot object in an entire ocean is mind blowing.

[bane]

Right, the two images are off of two different sensors. Probably off the same satellite, one is a panchromatic image and one is probably one channel off of a multispectral sensor. The DTGs are the same (March 16th 2014, 4:16Zulu/12:16 Local).

For reference, DIGO is the Australian version of the U.S. NGA.

They probably have a bunch of analysts pulling long shifts staring at endless images of ocean along the suspected track.

[robmcm]

Better to be safe that sorry http://bookriotcom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09...

[elleferrer]

Doubtful on this one. I've seen several objects in satellite images of 'significant size' on Tomnod

[glbrew]

That is fucking incredible they could find that in the Indian Ocean

[dingaling]

The Jindalee over-the-horizon backscatter radar in Western Australia has the reach and resolution for detecting a chunk of metal that size on the surface.

Normally it searches for contacts in a programmed grid pattern, sort of a random-chance game of finding bad guys ( HF backscatter radars don't sweep like UHF radars with which we are more familiar ).

I'd hazard a guess that they programmed a radar search of the suspected area and when it found a contact they went and checked the satellite imagery. Spectroscopy from the image capture showed the object to be non-natural.

[curiousDog]

Shouldn't this be quite easy to do with existing computer vision technology though (I'd assume this is a computer vision 101 class project)? Especially considering this is the ocean. The images were taken march 16nth, so they probably were running them through their software.

[rhizome]

Funny that the US Military and Intelligence technology was never put to use here. Gives you a sense of the ethics in play.

[markovbling]

Watched a mind-blowing TED talk by former NASA researcher Dan Berkenstock on the state of Satellite imagery and what we're going to be able to do in the next couple of years:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_berkenstock_the_world_is_one_bi...

One fascinating use-case is “gleaning a country’s consumption from images showing the number of cars in every one of its Walmart parking lots"

We live in such interesting times!

[eitally]

There was a story on NPR a few weeks back stating that Lowe's (or Home Depot, I can't remember) is already doing this.

[plicense]

Looks more like sea water reflection.

[chrisBob]

I just watched "All Is Lost" with Robert Redford, and I can't help but think that if you are going to have your boat sink in the Indian Ocean, now would be a REALLY good time to do it.

[triggercut]

As I mentioned in a previous thread:

Distance between: 43:58:34S 090:57:37E 44:03:02S 091:13:27E is 22.72km according to WolframAlpha

Images are from DigitalGlobe. A commercial satellite imagery / spatial data provider who provide a lot of imagery that powers Google Earth / Map. Also providing the imagery for the crowd-sourced effort for the search.

More info on their satellites on their wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigitalGlobe

[blackdogie]

The MH370 has the following dimensions

Wing span 60.9 metres; Overall length 63.7 metres; Tail Height 18.5 metres

Just thinking out loud... but a piece that's 24m long, seems a bit small. To me it makes me think of a boat or something similar. I guess the news agencies are happy with this news today, at least they don't have to keep on repeating the fluff from the last few days.

[mseebach]

60.9 meter wingspan, minus 5.8 meter cabin width, divided by two = 27.5 meters length of each wing. I'd say that computes.

[Cless]

I would never want to speculate, but I speculate that CNN's ratings will be back to their abysmal levels in a few weeks. :)

[tom_morrow]

for something to remain floating after 12 days?

maybe a wing with an empty fuel tank.

[houseofshards]

Question: why are they timestamped March 16, 2014 ?

[dangrossman]

I'd assume that's the time the photo was taken by the satellite.

[glimmung]

I'd have thought that was the date of the image capture - surely it takes an immense amount of time to process that volume of imagery in order to pick out such a thing?

[blueskin_]

404.

[Sarkie]

Is this really hacker news worthy?

[auctiontheory]

Even if you're not interested in planes or the souls on them, the technology deployed to find this needle in a large haystack is quite Hacker News-worthy.

[DigitalSea]

A plane full of people vanished with no sign of wreckage nor anything to go on with tens of thousands of kilometres of possible search area. I'd say this is definitely "Hacker News worthy".

[tsarzen]

Hacker News seems to be a community of people who are good at solving problems. This is a big problem that needs solving. Over 200 people missing, all with families who are going through a terrible time. I think the HN response to this is a very positive thing.