The Malaysian government has now released the raw satellite data which was used to conclude that the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean.
Before the copies of the data, which had remained obscure till now, was distributed to the media, they were handed over to the family members of the passengers onboard the plane. The families have been asking for greater transparency, amid the increasing amount of pressure they had been putting on the Malaysian government for having done little to find the ill-fated plane.
The 47-page data released on Tuesday is essentially an accumulation of the complex details which were used by British satellite company Inmarsat to calculate the possible flight path of MH370, and thereby determine - based on the reported 'pings' they received from the aircraft - that the Beijing-bound plane, with 239 people onboard, most probably flew towards the southern Indian ocean.
Using the data received from the pings, scientists drew two arcs, one extending towards the north and the other extending towards the southern Indian Ocean. Researchers were sure that the plane chose the southern trajectory on the curve and claimed that the plane, in all possibility, crashed in any one of the points in the southern arc.
The satellite data released on Tuesday shows the hourly "handshakes" between the plane and a communications satellite, which led the investigators to conclude that MH370 'ended its journey' in the waters near the western coast of Australia.
"Inmarsat and the DCA have been working for the release of the data communication logs and the technical description of the analysis," Malaysia's civil aviation authority revealed in a statement.
Biggest Civil Aviation Mystery of the Century
A seabed search for MH370 is still going on around the Australian city of Perth and an international team of experts, searching for any sign of the aircraft for almost three months, have found nothing whatsoever.
The bizarre circumstances in which the Boeing 777 aircraft simply vanished into thin air, just about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, has intrigued experts all around the world.
People have been trying hard to fill in the gaps of the mysterious occurrence, which is aptly referred to as civil aviation's biggest mystery of the century, by throwing in a spate of theories on how the plane possibly vanished.
While some people feel that the plane could have crashed somewhere in an undetected area, many other bizarre theories have also surfaced. While one theory opines that America could have shot down the plane knowingly or unknowingly, other fanciful theories, such as the possibility of an 'alien abduction' or a 'time warp', had also emerged.
