I think its a little odd that they are saying this debris is 24m long...its a bit precise isn't it? Why not say about 25m - can they really measure such an item by satellite to such a degree of accuracy?
Translation of a dimension originally marked up as 80 feet (by a US analyst, possibly) would do that.
We see lots of that sort of thing in the UK, where the metric and imperial systems are co-existing in an unhappy marriage and are frequently quoted side-by-side. It's by no means uncommon to see a measurement which is clearly a rounded number in one system being unthinkingly translated to some ludicrously precise value in the other... From humble recipe books on up.