How Inmarsat Hacked Their Data to Find Flight MH370

from: Physics Buzz Blog

The mystery behind the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 is no more. Engineers working out of the British company, Inmarsat, have used a “groundbreaking but traditional mathematics-based process” to conclude that the plane landed in a remote region of the southern Indian Ocean. Plane wreckage has yet to be found to support this notion.  ………………………

From most of the articles you’ll get a sense that it has something to do with the Doppler effect, trigonometry, a satellite and a magical mathematical equation that ties everything together. But how do these elements coalesce into a single, coherent story?

If you look at a general equation of the Doppler effect, you’ll notice that nowhere does it offer information about an object’s position in space. But you can still get an idea of an object’s location and direction of travel from the Doppler effect.  …………..

read the article

DCL: This is one of very few articles that actually deals with techniques used in reasoning about the positions of moving event emitters from the events they emit. This whole story is an instance of real-time CEP in practice – a very unusual one to be sure. It is an example of doing  hierarchical abstraction from the initial events using very specialized techniques. But of course those kinds of details are just not for the “general public”…. if you want to keep their attention, that is! So I have put one such article about the MH370 calculations on this website.