Malaysian Airlines MH 370 missing: Netizens come together to comb through satellite images

While ships and fighter jets from over a dozen countries are hunting for the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 flight, the Internet has turned to what it is best at: crowdsourcing. The company that has launched this campaign is earth imagery company called DigitalGlobe. The Colorado based firm owns one of the world’s most advanced commercial satellite networks, reports CNN.   DigitalGlobe has launched a campaign to scan the Gulf of Thailand. They have activated their Tomnod crowdsourcing platform to help locate the jet by asking volunteers to scan through imagery captured by our satellites.   On Sunday, two of the company’s satellites collected imagery of the area where evidence suggested the Malaysia Airlines aircraft may have crashed into the water, close to where the Gulf of Thailand meets the South China Sea. The spacecraft collected approximately 3,200 square kilometers of imagery that can now be analysed by the crowd using DigitalGlobe’s Tomnod platform.   So how will it work? Basically users can access the platform and point out what looks suspicious on the map. “This is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem, except the haystack is in the middle of the ocean,” Luke Barrington of DigitalGlobe told CNN. “I will ask you to mark anything that looks interesting, any signs of wreckage or life rafts."    According to their official blogpost, “More than 2 million people have tagged some 645,000 features so far, making this the largest Tomnod campaign in history by orders of magnitude. We have continually tasked our satellites to image the ever-widening search area and now have more than 24,000 square kilometers of imagery available for the crowd to comb through."    Thanks to the amount of interest in the missing MH370, the website seems to be crashing for a lot of users. You can find out more about this crowdsourcing effort from here.