Tomnod: How to Join the Virtual Search Party for Missing Flight MH370 James Vincent - The Independent
go to original March 14, 2014

A satellite imaging company says 3 million people have logged on to its website to help search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The images come from satellites owned by Colorado-based Digital Globe and are covering the same areas being searched by boats and planes. Carter Evans reports. (CBSEveningNews)

A satellite company has set up a crowd-sourcing initiative encouraging internet users to scan and tag images of more than 1,200 square miles of ocean to locate missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

Tomnod, which takes its name from the Mongolian word for “big eye”, has previously been used in response to Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines last November. During that campaign volunteers tagged over 60,000 objects of interest from satellite photos, information that the company then passed on to disaster relief teams.

Just hours after the disappearance of flight MH370 and its 239 passengers DigitalGlobe, the digital mapping company who run the Tomnod site, repositioned two of their five satellites over the Gulf of Thailand region – the last known location of the aircraft.

The online response was enough to crash the site, but not before internet users had viewed DigitalGlobe’s maps six million times. The virtual search party are given directions to tag any hints of airplane wreckage, life rafts, oil slicks or “anything interesting or suspicious”.

Click here to visit Tomnod and join the search yourself

Read the rest at The Independent

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