Waking up to no news still :( another merchant ship due to arrive by the evening. The Guardian had this interesting snippet:
'A lingering question that remains about the way this operation has unfolded is how the DigitalGlobe satellite came to be tasked in that particular area the Indian Ocean on 16 March. Here’s an explanation as to how the process could have worked from Chris Rizos, a professor of geodesy and navigation at the University of New South Wales:
DigitalGlobe have several satellites and they have the highest accuracy in terms of pixels of any commercial satellite imaging system. They’re basically spy satellites. They would be typically tasked to do work on land, and so it’s a little unusual to do it on the ocean, unless they’ve done it off their own bat or if a government has asked them to do it.
That analysis is supported by an industry representative in the spatial and remote sensing profession, who outlined in greater detail how the process would have unfolded with DigitalGlobe. The key part is in bold:
Most of the high image satellites operators are commercial. They are satellites that continuously orbit the earth at a low orbit, about 350 - 500km above the earth. They have basically two ways of collecting images. One is large contracts that they secure through governments mainly. The second way is through resellers.
What DigitalGlobe has done is cottoned on to the search area on the 16th. They wouldn’t be capturing that area without a good reason.
The industry representative then walked through how the information would have ended up being passed to Australia:
What would have happened is that the image would have been passed through the chain of command and that would have gone from DigitalGlobe to the department of defence in the US and then would have been passed to Australia. The process they would use is simply to open it up and do a visual check pixel by pixel to see what shouldn’t be there.'