Replicas of a large piece of debris from missing Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 are to be set adrift and tracked by satellite in the hope of helping find the plane’s crash site, Australian officials said yesterday.
Canberra is leading the search for the aircraft, which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people onboard. Search teams are probing the floor of the Indian Ocean off the Australia’s west coast.
In a regular update on the underwater search, which has so far failed to find a single piece of debris from the plane, the Australian government said a new drift modeling study would be done.
The government’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre said that while experts had been working to model the drift of MH370 debris over the past 18 months, a “further intensive study will be undertaken.”
Of particular interest to the modeling will be the first piece of debris found from MH370 — a 2m wing part known as a flaperon — which washed up on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion in July last year.
“Over the last nine months there has been a range of debris found along western Indian Ocean shorelines that has been linked to MH370,” the center said in the statement. “The flaperon is, however, particularly important as it was the first piece of debris to be found and therefore it spent the least amount of time adrift.”
Phase one of the study, which is to commence in coming months, involves setting adrift ocean drifter buoys used in a global drifter program along with models of the flaperon fitted with satellite trackers.
“The models will be tracked to establish the rate and direction of drift relative to the drifter buoys in open-ocean conditions when subject to similar winds, currents and waves,” the center said.
About 30 years of real-life drift data available from the global drifter program will then be used to model the movement of the flaperon.
The agency has committed to combing about 120,000km2 of ocean floor in a process that is expected to end in December.
It has faced scrutiny about whether the plane — which diverted from its route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing for reasons unknown — is searching in the right area.
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