Hope floats The grainy photo taken on March 18, two days after the Australian satellite picture, shows an object 22 metre long and 13 metre wide in the southern Indian Ocean The object was spotted around 120 km “south by west” of potential debris reported by Australia off its west coast It could not easily be determined from the blurred images whether or not the objects were the same, but the Chinese photograph depicted a cluster of smaller objects

Kuala Lumpur/Perth, Australia, March 22
China said on Saturday it had a new satellite image of what could be wreckage from the missing Malaysian airliner, as more planes and ships headed to join an international search operation scouring some of the remotest seas on Earth.

The latest possible lead came as the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 entered its third week, with still no confirmed trace found of the Boeing 777 or the 239 persons on board. The new potential sighting was dramatically announced by Malaysia's acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, after he was handed a note with details during a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, scooping the official announcement from China. "Chinese ships have been dispatched to the area," Hishammuddin said.

China said the object was 22 metre long and 13 metre wide, and spotted around 120 km "south by west" of potential debris reported by Australia off its west coast in the forbidding waters of the southern Indian Ocean.

The image was captured by the high-definition Earth observation satellite Gaofen-1 early on March 18, two days after the Australian satellite picture was taken, China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense said on its website.

It could not easily be determined from the blurred images whether the objects were the same, but the Chinese photograph could depict a cluster of smaller objects, a senior military officer from one of the 26 nations involved in the search for the plane said.

The wing of a Boeing 777-200ER is approximately 27 metres long and 14 metres wide at its base, according to estimates derived from publicly available scale drawings. Its fuselage is 63.7 metres long by 6.2 metres wide.

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens early on March 8, less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on a scheduled flight to Beijing.

Investigators believe someone on board shut off the plane's communications systems, and partial military radar tracking showed it turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot. That has led them to focus on hijacking or sabotage, but they have not ruled out technical problems. — Reuters