Steve Fossett Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery

On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon went missing in Nevada. An airplane he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.

Through the generous efforts of individuals at several organizations, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

Instructions
Go to Amazon Mechanical Turk at:
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60&kw=Flash

You will be shown a single satellite image. The task is to flag any satellite images which contain foreign objects that may resemble Steve's airplane or parts of a plane. Steve's plane will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 21 pixels long and 30 pixels in wingspan.


Example of the size of object to look for. The white plane shown above (30 pixel wingspan by 21 pixels by length) is approximately the size of Steve's plane.



Notes
If in doubt, be conservative and mark the image. For complete coverage, we've set up this HIT such that multiple people will cover the same area several times over. Please do your best, but do not worry that missing one little detail will be tragic. It will get caught.

Marked images will be sent to a team of specialists who will determine if they contain information on the whereabouts of Steve Fossett.

Friends and family of Steve Fossett would like to thank you for helping them with this cause.

This may be a stupid question, but how up to date are the images?

These are supposedly the latest images of the search area taken Monday IIRC.

If he's down in one of the frames don't expect the aircraft to look like the aircraft in the example. Crash sites look different -- the wings may not be attached, it may be belly-up. I'm assuming these are infra-red images. The aircraft has fabric and metal, not sure how that looks on IR. It would be nice to see a Citabria Super D in the example image.

Most of my searches were at 9000-11000 ft in anything but flat terrain. Nobody would scout for a place to break a land speed record in this terrain.

What I learned from this effort is that these guys think Fossett went down in the mountains. He was probably just out on a fun sightseeing flight in the mountains. Fairly rugged terrain. Found a couple spots that look interesting for camping and hiking.

What would be nice is if they'd show us satellite images of the crash sites they've located recently so we can see what one looks like. Those would be much better examples of what to look for than the image of an aircraft sitting at an airport.

If Fossett had gone down on one of the dry lake beds or flat lands, they would have found him right away.

No, I'll bet he's down in a canyon somewhere. And maybe not even within current search parameters. He may have had a sudden thought: "Hey, Mack said he thought he say some long narrow lakes beds down by Mono Lake" or something.

I hope someone finds him soon. He's fast running out of time.

Sue

I'm am frustrated. I figured out how to cut and paste the search coordinates to Google earth and have a look.

I found something of interest outside the tiny square offered but the page offering the coordinates has checkboxes that can't be checked and a comment box that can't be filled in so I can't report the object.
And there's no address for help.

Yes, I DO know what to look for. My website is coloradowreckchasing.com.

I hate lame software.

Anybody got an idea on what to do?

Are those images darker than all get out for anyone else? Maybe if they could take the images during the day, or shove a big flash adapter on the satellite?

Ah heck- I think I figured it out. The first time I Accepted a HIT it made me login and then said I'd done it wrong.
Next time I accepted it enabled the buttons and the comment screen.

This is a low-percentage way to search but innovative.
I don't expect to see wings/tail shapes. But.... it costs nothing to look.

Once a crash has modified the aircraft to something other than a nice geometrical object, searching at low resolution is a low probability technique. That's why they call it artificial artificial-intelligence.