point been considered a possible path for the plane. if you look at the plots that we have using our recent adjusted techniques, we can say that the most likely route is the south and the most likely ending is roughly in the area where they are looking now. reporter: the new satellite data comes as aircraft spotted possible debris in the southern corridor search area, including at least one item that appears orange. satellite i mages from france said that a ship to recover them has so far found nothing. now, the heartbreaking search is concentrated in the southern indian ocean. china will likely send more ships, including one with a data recorder locater as this mission moves from rescue to recovery. both the malaysian government and airlines will have news conferences tomorrow but their comments today mentioned nothing
this equation. another part is called the doppler effect. you hear weather people talk about it all the time. in terms of the location on the earth, just for understanding it, imagine the satellite is about 22,000 miles above the earth if you went straight down. if it sent a signal out, a handshake with a plane out back, that would mean that the plane is in a certain area. then, if you did it again and it were further, took longer to get that signal, it would suggest that it was further out somewhere. that s how they established the pattern of the dots right here a. series of signals that they received from the plane suggesting it was somewhere along this arc. they knew it wasn t to the north because, as authorities looked at it, there wasn t a lot of there weren t any radar hits out there. plus, the earth is not perfectly
a locator system be moved into the area to help find the recorders. it s a listening device put into the water to help find the pings of the recorder. it s not very useful until you have a debris field. it can t be picked up by human ears but listen to what it sounds like. now, this is a very difficult search with so many obstacles. ian is a professor of ocean nothing gra fee at florida state. you ve given us maps to look at to show where the possible wreckage could be if the debris spotted on march 16th could be confirmed as part of the plane. explain this map that we re looking at with the plotted points with the red and black ones. what do we see? the best way to find the
we re all about the southern arc? jim, what we try to do is strive to be accurate. we want to give the best information so that someone can make decisions and take action. in this case, narrow down a search area or direct search aircraft and you ve got to think, if you re an inmarsat and you re trying to do something that your data was not trying to do and you re trying to do this math and trying to make sure that you re accurate and don t want to give false hope to the grieving families that we ve had our hearts go out to in the past few weeks, you want to get it right. they are taking all of the information that they had into account. the variations and what they are able to get from this older lockheed martin satellite in this area and really make sure that they had something as near to definitive as they could, as you heard from their spokesman,