ABSTRACT

When the Malaysian airliner MH370 went missing in March 2014, a wide range of spaceborne assets took part in the extensive search from wreckage. Members of the public were surprised when orbiting satellites failed to spot anything - didn't spy satellites give us real time imaging of every part of the planet, all the time? The best clue came not from imaging, but from a communications satellite exchanging small data packets with the airliner. I'll explain how this allowed investigators to narrow down the search, and discuss the increasingly international and commercial fleet of low, medium and high resolution Earth imaging satellites which scan our planet, and the little known role of satellite communications in linking machines rather than humans.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, USA. He studies black holes, quasars and X-ray sources in galaxies, as well as developing data analysis software for the X-ray astronomy community. Dr. McDowell has a B.A. in Mathematics (1981) and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics (1986) from the University of Cambridge, England. He currently leads the group that plans and tests the science analysis software for the Chandra space telescope. Dr. McDowell's scientific publications include studies of cosmology, black holes, merging galaxies, quasars, and asteroids. Jonathan is also the editor of Jonathan's Space Report, a free internet newsletter founded in 1989 that provides technical details of satellite launches, and was formerly a columnist in Sky and Telescope Magazine. Dr. McDowell's web site, planet4589.org, provides the most comprehensive historical list of satellite launch information starting with Sputnik, and he carries out research on space history topics using original sources including declassified Department of Defense documents and Russian-language publications.