The United States extensively reviewed imagery taken by American spy satellites for evidence of a mid-air explosion, but saw none, a U.S. government source said. The source described U.S. satellite coverage of the region as thorough.
I was going to ask if you could use all those NRO satellites to find out what happened to this plane.QuoteThe United States extensively reviewed imagery taken by American spy satellites for evidence of a mid-air explosion, but saw none, a U.S. government source said. The source described U.S. satellite coverage of the region as thorough.http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/10/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140310
There are two ways that modern satellite constellations can help events like this in the future:1) Improve black boxes by constantly streaming data over the whole trip in real-time. We're already starting to get satellite internet on some flights (I'm talking satellite internet, not the usual cell tower based internet that is normal for in-flight wifi now), so adding another data stream wouldn't be insurmountable at all.
That could be hard. Airplane crashes into the ocean sometimes don't leave much of any debris and the amount of area needed to be covered could be kind of large.
What about the 5 & half hours worth of jet fuel aboard the MH370 flight when it disappear? Especially since the ocean bottom is about 250 meters down.
I'd also task the sats to look for activity at abandoned WWII-era airstrips in the area (especially recently cleared bomber-rated strips) and for areas of suspiciously disturbed canopy around these that might indicate a large something had been hastily camouflaged. My gut feeling is that the aircraft may be on the ground somewhere and in more-or-less one piece;
Global aviation surveillance using the Iridium network to have realtime aircraft updates anywhere on the globe:http://www.aireon.comSkybox, updating Earth's satellite imagery every few hours (only launched one satellite so far, going to have a large constellation):http://skybox.com/Similar group, with more of their constellation already launched (but lower resolution):http://www.planet-labs.com/
Getting back on topic I doubt it will take so long or be such a mystery that anyone will be willing to compromise whatever intelligence assets might be helpful.
[If a breakup occurred at altitude, the fuel would have dispersed and not left a slick.
There's no law that says a fuel tank couldn't have remained intact if the plane disintegrated.
Late Mar 12th 2014 China's State Administration of Science (SASTIND) reported, they discovered three large objects sized 13x18, 14x19 and 24x22 meters at position N6.7 E105.63 (121nm eastsoutheast of the last known secondary radar position), all three objects within a radius of 20km (11nm) and published the satellite images, taken on Mar 9th 2014 at 11:00 Beijing time (03:00Z), see below. SASTIND stated they are committed to provide further search services to locate flight MH-370.