Malaysian Airlines 777 with 239 Aboard Missing

If it had happened over land, it probably would've been tracked. But 100 miles out to sea? That's well over the horizon from shore, so out of range of radar. But, yeah, you'd think planes would have some kind of satellite communication wherein they send their GPS coordinates to the airline every so often, if for no other reason than to maintain scheduling.

Based on the evidence so far, I don't think it would make a difference if the crash site was located in 5 minutes or 5 days. There are going to be no survivors and the wreckage of the plane is going to be on the bottom of the sea.

Commercial airliners are not typically tracked on radar, at least not in the sense you mean. They have transponders squawking their vitals and that's what gets tracked. That said, even a small body of water like the South China Sea is a huge area to search.

OMG I just realized! None of this means shit until CNN's Christiane Amanpour comes on and over-pronounces the loving shit out of every foreign sounding word/name for us illiterate, unlearned savages. I hope she uses circles and arrows on 8 x 10 color glossies.
Seriously, oil slicks are not a good sign. There is a whole lot of real estate on that journey, and hopefully at least a few survived to tell the tale.

I'd figure that somebody would have spy satellites taking pics over the ocean at all times and would at least be able to say, "We see the plane in this frame, but not in the next frame, which means it crashed somewhere in this area."

Exactly how much territory do you think a spy satellite can monitor at any one time?

The Soviets found this out in 1981 when they couldn't find a fleet of 83 NATO warships led by the U.S.S. Eisenhower even though they knew when it set out from the United States, how large it was (from agents in the U.S. ) and where it was going. The Soviets launched TWO satellites specifically designed to detect warship movements and could not locate the NATO force.

Spy satellites are in low Earth orbit, so only remain over a particular area for a very short time. And there aren't so many of them that the whole surface of the Earth could be captured at any given moment.

So, even if they just periodically snapped images of the planet below (they don't), they'd be unlikely to capture anything useful. Since the crash happened at night over dark seas, it would be difficult to optically image the aircraft, anyway.

We can see the astronaut stranded on Mars but can't find one plane. Amiright?

I thought a lot of spy satellites were in geosynchronous orbit, and they have the ability to look at things way beyond the visual spectrum.

Given that every major nation on the planet has lots of them, this again, seems hard to believe. Additionally, civilian Earth imaging satellites are now as capable as the classified military ones from a couple of decades or so ago.

Which is kind of silly, given how cheap harddrive space is these days. I can't imagine they're still ejecting film canisters out the back any more.

If it exploded in mid-air or on impact, I'd think you'd be able to image that.

Again, I'm not saying that some government agency in some country is sitting on the information, only that its a bit odd with all the tech we do have, that we haven't made a greater effort to ensure that large airliners (at the very least) can't be tracked and located at all times.

(A) You're not owed anything and (B) it's not comparable just because you say so.

Communications and weather satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, because they need to remain stationary (relative to the surface) and cover a large part of the world. You wouldn't put a satellite intended to image surface details of the Earth--in any part of the spectrum--that far away (22,000 miles vs. 100-1200 miles for LEO).

Not all communications or weather satellites are in geosynch orbit. Its impossible to get a signal to a geosynch satellite if you're on the north slope of a mountain in Canada, nor can you do it if you're on the southern slope of a mountain in South America. You also can't image the poles unless you pass directly over them. (I worked for a satphone company back in '01 and had to learn what was where so people didn't buy the wrong thing.)

I get that. I'm not saying that all of them are, I'm saying that some of them are.

The Earth is REALLY big. I mean, do the math: if a satellite can capture, say, 100 square miles per image, how many do you need to capture the 200 million or so square miles of the Earth?

True, but again, coverage of the entire world at any given moment is simply impossible.

Space is cheap, but transmitting data back to Earth still takes power.

Presuming you had the coverage and it was updated pretty quickly, you might capture the flash of an explosion, or maybe a fiery trail. But, again, that kind of coverage doesn't exist.

I think it's simpler just to have airplanes transmit their coordinates/airspeed/etc. to a satellite periodically.

No, of course not. But the satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit are used for these purposes.

This is where you sometimes get the "Star Trek" effect where peoples expectations regarding technology are influenced by science fiction (or any fiction). similar to the so called "CSI Effect" where people on juries are sometimes said to have too high of expectations regarding forensic technology.

In science fiction you often have a ship in orbit "scan" for something on the surface of a planet and report the information back in seconds. That is impossible with today's tech.

Another reason is "Spy Satellite wank". Spy satellites are expensive. Expensive to build, Expensive to launch. So their advocates will tend to give exaggerated indications of their actual capabilities.

True, but forget spy satellites for a minute ... my crappy cell phone can probably tell what room of my house it's in. We can't manage something like that for an entire freaking airplane?

A little googling shows that tracking of aircraft via signals from the aircraft is already in place in many places. The FAA will soon (2020) require aircraft to have ADS-B transponders which send their position information to stations on the ground. Many aircraft are already fitted with this capability. (This is how you are able to follow a flight on www.flightradar24.com ... check that website out!)

Of course, the aircraft has to be in range of a ground-based receiver for this information to be available, but it sounds like satellites may soon be able to detect these signals to cover more remote areas.

If you, your cell phone, and house were 7 miles above the South China Sea, I have my doubts.

Check it out... (from www.flightradar24.com)



This is from ADS-B data (signals from the planes) and NOT from radar.

This is updated in near real-time.

Sure, just as soon as we blanket the world's oceans with a grid of cell towers every few miles.

Isn't the location function satellite-based, not tower-based?

GPS units determine their own position by tracking GPS satellites, not the other way around. Much easier for your phone to pinpoint a dozen or so fixed position orbiting satellites, than for a GPS satellite to keep track of tens of millions of extremely low powered GPS devices that are constantly milling about. And also what steve2^4 said.

Bunches, and the US alone has bunches, as do the Russians, the Brits, Google, etc.

FTFY. It can be done, we'd just rather spend our money elsewhere.

You know what kind of power it takes to send a signal from a GPS satellite to the Earth? Less than that used to power the low beam on a car. Again, it can be done, we just don't want to.

Again, I just said it was kind of surprising that we hadn't gotten to that point.

Belt and suspenders, my dear boy. Belt and suspenders.

Most cellphones use a combination of GPS/cell tower/wifi signals to figure out a person's location. By combining one or more of them, they can do a better job of pinpointing one's location than by using just GPS or cell towers.

Honestly, dotting the oceans with structures like cell towers is really a good idea. They'd enable us to better monitor the health of the oceans and could also be used to detect things like tsunamis.

Hm... interesting. So if I understand right, then, my phone knows where it is because it talks to the satellites and towers, but there's no way anyone else knows unless the phone tells them, and in the middle of the ocean it might know its own location to within a few meters but not have a good way to communicate that information?

Basically, yes.

I guess you're not getting what I'm saying.

If a SINGLE satellite can cover 100 square miles in an image, then you would need TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND such satellites to get real time coverage of the entire Earth.

Spy satellites cover a small part of the world they're focused on. Google's world map is not real-time.

Again, you're not appreciating the scope of what you suggest. This has nothing to do with politics.

And, yes, it would be a fantastic waste of money to spend a trillion dollars for such a system, when the same results can be accomplished far more cheaply by other means.

Of course we don't want to. It's not an economically feasible idea and it accomplishes nothing that can't be equally accomplished by far cheaper means.

Satellites are really expensive. What does the suspenders buy us that we don't already get with the belt?

Dang not again, how do I fix this?

I.E. "bunches," as I said.

Yes, I know this.

A typical satellite costs $200 million dollars, plus another $50-$100 million to put into orbit, and depending upon their orbit can have an operational life of up to 10 years or more. (Note that launch costs may actually be cheaper than the figure I quoted, since I'm not using the estimates that SpaceX has given for future launches.)

You mean like sending humans to the Moon or Mars when robots can do the same thing for less cost? Tell me, which gets people more interested, humans walking around on the Moon or Mars, or robots?

As for the benefits of sending up that many satellites, there's actually a number of them. In addition to greater ability to monitor things like climate in real time, better satellite imagery in case of natural disasters, the economies of scale of building so many satellites and launching them will dramatically lower the price of getting to space. Then there are the unknowable knock-on effects that will come having so many birds up there, and having cheaper launch costs. It would pay off, but not in something that someone could point to on the bottom line of a balance sheet in advance and say, "There. That's exactly what it'll give us." The same way we couldn't know all the spin offs that would result from the Apollo program or the internet or the introduction of smartphones.

Again, its like the robots going to Mars.

Redundancy, for one thing. That French jetliner which crashed after leaving Brazil suffered from faulty readings of its airspeed due to icing on its sensors. More data about what's happening on the Earth means that we can do more accurate climate modeling. This is handy, not only for doing things like predicting the weather, but in the aftermath of a disaster, we've got a lot of images to scan to see if we can find any clues that would help us have better advance warnings so that we can save lives the next time a similar disaster happens.

We will do this, eventually, its just a question of when. (We'll also have oodles of unmanned drones in both the air and water, as well as a multitude of other gear deployed in an effort to better understand the planet.) We don't have any choice, since our survival as a species depends upon us knowing as much as we possibly can about our planet.

This is the Red Room, sir. I will check no such thing.