A Thai satellite has captured images showing over 300 floating objects in the southern Indian Ocean, which could be pieces of wreckage from the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
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The objects were spotted around 2,700 kilometers (1,680 miles) southwest of Perth by the Thaichote satellite on March 24, Thailand's Geo Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISDA) said in a statement Thursday.
Anond Snidvongs, who directs Thailand's space technology development agency, told AP there were around 300 objects in total, with some of them measuring some of them measuring an estimated 52 feet in length. The images took two days to process and were then forwarded to Malaysian authorities on Wednesday, Anond said.
The findings mark the fifth set of satellite images to show possible debris from Flight 370 in remote parts of the Indian Ocean.
On Wednesday, Malaysia's acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, told a news conference that around 122 objects were discovered in the Indian Ocean by France-based Airbus Defense and Space on March 23.
Anond says the objects were about 125 miles from the area where the Thai satellite on Sunday spotted scores of objects the following day.
It has yet to be determined if any of the objects are from Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people aboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital.
If the aircraft is proved to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, this leads to many other questions, such as how the crash took place and who was responsible. Theories currently range from a hijacking to sabotage or even a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems.
Malaysia’s handling of the crash has sparked a furious response from Beijing, as 153 Chinese nationals were onboard the missing jetliner.
After Malaysian authorities recently pronounced that everyone on board was presumed dead without presenting any physical evidence, China’s deputy foreign minister, Xie Hangsheng, demanded that Malaysia hand over all relevant satellite analysis, showing how their conclusions about the plane’s fate were reached.
Meanwhile, they are currently racing against the clock to find the plane’s black box, which is believed to be in an area of the ocean about the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined.
The search is made all the more urgent because the battery-powered ping the black boxes emit, a kind of homing signal to help locate them, is only sent out for around 30 days after a crash – before the batteries run out. This leaves another 13 days or so to find them.