system is back in service after a 6 day outage the satellite agency said it fixed i m sorry a malfunction in the ground control sensors that make time and orbit predictions galileo has 22 satellites that help track mobile phone users and cars it s been in a pilot phase since december 26th team and is due to become fully operational next year supposedly offering a european alternative to the u.s. and russian controlled networks. and let s take a look at some the other business stories making news. g 7 ministers and central bankers have met with philanthropist melinda gates near paris to discuss how to reduce inequality they ve pledged more than 100000000 euros to help women in africa play a bigger role in the global digital economy and most of the funding will come from the bill and melinda gates foundation. finance ministers of the g. 7 meeting also move towards an agreement on taxing digital giants the u.s.
given the searchers. thailand s space agency or satellite agency spotted this. if you looked at it with the naked eye, you d think they re really shooting into a night sky and we re seeing nothing but stars. but they believe that they ve now identified these white dots, which should be as many as 300 different pieces of debris, and they are in an area that is condensed enough to make them believe it could be a debris field. where is this area? that s another thing that s interesting here. we are talking about 125 miles or so from where these images were taken by that french satellite. remember that that was on sunday. then it took a day or two to actually process. and again, white images here, and varied sizes. varying sizes of debris. the other interesting point here is what we re talking about on the latitude and the longitude. 90 east by 44 west. that is the area known as the roaring 40s.
minor crack growth that might have resulted in a skin failure, which the plane is designed so that the skin fails it vents benignly. so that couldn t cause a crash? very, very unlikely. but i d like to add to what chairman hall said, this investigation has gotten off to a very slow start. i don t know whether the fact is it s a national airline there s a lot of plid or the military/civil relationship there because there s been expert faa, the people that jim hoped were there, they are there, the radar experts. the sharing of the data has been slow and even this chinese photo apparently was taken several days ago. so this investigation has not gotten off to a start you would expect. let s say, jim hall, that these images that the chinese satellite agency have released, turn out to be a false lead, let s say the malaysian air force which yesterday suggested the plane after the transponder
keith, if these satellite images are correct, and we don t know if they are, they may be correct, may not be, this is what the chinese satellite agency has released saying they found these three suspicious large pieces of debris floating there in the waters just south of vietnam. but say they are correct. what does that say to you? wolf, i m by no means a satellite imagery expert but if the images are correct and if they are parts of the missing airplane, that might indicate that the aircraft was intact upon impact with the water. if the airplane had had a structural in-flight breakup there would have been a much larger debris field covering many, many miles. as a pilot of the 777, keith, does it say anything to you at all about the potential cause of a plane simply losing its transponder and crashing into the water, let s say? no, not exactly.
40-mile-an-hour winds. so from 40, from 190. so dramatically different, dramatically weakened, thank goodness, but still quite a player. wow, incredible. fragments from a european satellite are expected to fall from space. that s yet another issue. yeah, people are thinking about it, worried about, thinking about the images they ve seen from movies. right. all right. the former worse than the latter, okay? the typhoon certainly a bigger issue than this guy. what goes up must come down, isn t that the case? the satellite up in space with european satellite agency, it s falling from space, it ran out of gas. the timeline tomorrow afternoon into monday afternoon. now, it s most likely to hit water, because, well, the planet s mostly water. so that s most likely what will happen. this is the size of it. it s the size of about a chevy, a large chevy suburban. just for the record, never have in known history has space debris likely hit anyone. but, you know, you can keep your