Five days after a plane carrying 239 passengers disappeared into thin air, the international community is desperate for an answer.
Any morsel of rationale for why the “supremely safe” Boeing 777 vanished is swallowed like a pill. A brief report claiming the Royal Malaysian Air force had detected the missing plane “hundreds of miles off course” dominated the news cycle Tuesday night, only to be retracted when the air force chief spoke out, denying it. The false claim is one of at least a dozen coloring the narrative. Other offenders are apparent “debris” sightings, passenger cellphone calling, and lethal terrorist identification.
But as the media plays tug-of-war over why a seemingly well-functioning plane disappeared on a simple trip from Kuala Lumpar to Beijing, one American company is focusing on where it could’ve happened.
Using high-resolution satellite images and the eyes of any human that’s willing to help, earth imagery company
DigitalGlobe launched a campaign to scan the Gulf of Thailand for survivors. “If you ever looked at Google Earth or Apple maps, you’ve seen DigitalGlobe’s work,” Luke Barrington, the company’s senior manager of geospatial big data. With five high-resolution satellites in space, DigitalGlobe is the leading earth-imagery company in the world, offering services to clients that range from the defense community to the oil experts.
The project itself is fueled by Tomnod, a pioneering crowdsourcing platform that DigitalGlobe purchased last April. Tomnod, which is entirely user-driven, outsources the analysis of satellite photos to anyone with the time and energy to review them.
Previously used for disasters and crises ranging from tsunamis to wildfires, it was DigitalGlobe’s users who concluded that it would be useful in the Malaysia mystery. At the best of them, the company began making images of the potential crash sites in the Gulf of Thailand public on their website. Anyone who is willing to review one pixel of this vast space (roughly the equivalent of a homeplate) is able to.
The response was overwhelming. In just 24 hours, nearly a half a million people had jumped in to help on DigitalGlobe, viewing roughly 1 million maps per hour. In the images from the satellites—which are retrieved daily—users tag can anything that looks even remotely out of place.
