Most people have probably heard the tragic news of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mysteriously losing contact and disappearing mid-flight four days ago. Neither the plane's wreckage nor passengers have been found, and they have no signal from the plane's transponder. Nobody is sure why it crashed or where it went, and authorities are still searching.
Crowdsourcing platform Tomnod allows internet users to help comb through digital satellite images to look for something that might help the real-life search operation. Using the site, you can tag objects of interest for others to examine and look for clues that may offer an idea of where the plane went.
Tomnod is provided with satellite imagery by its parent company DigitalGlobe. The campaign for finding the missing flight on the site began Monday, as authorizes still had not located the aircraft. The company's satellites collected roughly 3,200km of images from the Gulf of Thailand after the disappearance, which are being used for the online search.
Volunteers can look for wreckage or unidentified objects, making note of them for others to look at give input about, and hopefully lead to a breakthrough. Because of these efforts, Tomnod is seeing an "unprecedented level" of site traffic as people attempt to help search.
DigitalGlobe acquired Tomnod last year. The crowdsourcing site was used following the November 2013 typhoon in the Philippines to help search or rescue operations. After that event, users on the site tagged 60,000 objects in the first day of using the site. Hopefully Tomnod, or any group, soon can shed light on what happened to the flight.
Source: CNET
