British satellite company Immarsat has reportedly furnished first plausible information in the extended search for the missing Malaysian Airline jet that vanished on March 8th.
Scientists at Immarsat spent the past fortnight crunching vast amounts of data to provide leads into the fate of Flight MH370, which planes and ships failed to accomplish.
According to the Independent, Immarsat was set up 35 years ago to provide communications for shipping and has now become one of the world's largest satellite operators.
Data from the 'pings' sent by the plane to Immarsat's satellite soon after going off radar was analyzed to establish within four days that it had traveled along one of two vast arcs heading north across southern and central Asia or south across a vast expanse of ocean.
The report said that the firm used the 'doppler effect' technology, something that has never been used before, as the basis for a method of modeling the particular path of a jet, and established how the jet plunged into the freezing waters of the Indian Ocean some 1,500 miles south-west of Australia.
The company said it was able to provide a location with a margin of error of about 100 miles, but could not be more precise because the satellite was a 1990s model and not fitted with the GPS capability that would provide precise location.
Applauding the firm's work, an oceanographer with Southampton University, Dr Simon Boxall, said that Immarsat had probably crammed a year's worth of research into maybe a couple of weeks, and technologically it was quite astounding, the report said.
