Satellite Company Wants You to Help Find Malaysia Jet

DigitalGlobe hopes crowdsourcing can locate plane
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 12, 2014 10:46 AM CDT
Satellite Company Wants You to Help Find Malaysia Jet
A woman writes a message for passengers aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines plane on a banner at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.   (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)

Malaysian authorities seem to have generated nothing but confusion and ill will in the hunt for Flight MH370. Now a Colorado company offers a way for people to do more than vent frustration—they can help scan satellite images, reports the Denver Post. DigitalGlobe wants people to go to its crowdsourcing platform to look at and tag images of the ocean that look promising. An algorithm will then examine results and highlight any areas generating an unusual number of tags, explains ABC News.

“We’ll say, ‘Here are our top 10 suspicious or interesting locations,’” says a company official. “Is it really an aircraft wing that’s been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100% sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I’d start." Of course, the satellite images are based on authorities' best guesses on where the plane might be, and those seem to be changing daily. (More Malaysia Airlines crash stories.)

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