March 22, 2014
Photo courtesy of www.cbsnews.com
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A satellite image released by China on Saturday offered the latest sign that wreckage from a Malaysia Airlines plane lost for more than two weeks could be in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean where planes and ships have been searching for three days.
The image, showing an object 72 feet by 43 feet, was taken around noon Tuesday. The image location was about 75 miles south of where anAustralian satellite viewed two objects two days earlier. The larger object was about as long as the one the Chinese satellite detected.
“The news that I just received is that the Chinese ambassador received a satellite image of a floating object in the southern corridor and they will be sending ships to verify,” Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters Saturday.
CBS News correspondent Holly Williams reports from Perth, Australia, where the country’s search flights are headquartered, that the Chinese government also said a smaller object roughly 40 feet in length was also seen.
Australian officials said the location was within the 14,000-square-mile area they searched on Saturday, but the object was not found. Australian Maritime Safety Authority spokeswoman Andrea Hayward-Maher said she did not know whether the precise coordinates of the location had been searched, but added that coordinators will use the information to refine the search area.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is overseeing the search in the region, said a civil aircraft reported seeing a number of small objects in the search area, including a wooden pallet, but a New Zealand military plane diverted to the location found only clumps of seaweed. The agency said in a statement that searchers would keep trying to determine whether the objects are related to the lost plane.
“CBS This Morning” contributor Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York, said this week that the area is “quite turbulent, and even a gentle current of 5 miles an hour could carry debris of hundreds of miles across.”
The latest satellite image is another clue in the baffling search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which dropped off air traffic control screens March 8 over the Gulf of Thailand with 239 people on board.