Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[techgeek]

satellite pics of a/c in flight

@uncle_maxwell

That is an interesting proposition. If IR sat photos, taken at night, are available that cover each arc at the time of a given ping it is a reasonable computational exercise to use standard image processing techniques to find the a/c. in a photo. The search algorithm could match a rendered IR image of the a/c with "camera view" of the sat. Big data search techniques like map/reduce on a supercomputer could perform this search quickly. I've written such programs myself and know what I am talking about.

Same goes for daylight photos although the pattern matching would probably be done differently.

This would answer the N or S question and greatly narrow the SAR parameters. IMHO it's is well worth looking into if photos are available.