VANCOUVER, Canada — Had Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared just a few weeks later, we may have been able to find it in a matter of hours.
A company called Planet Labs is in the process of activating a squadron of tiny satellites that they released from the International Space Station last month. These compact satellites will orbit Earth, snapping images of nearly every inch of our planet. As Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield pointed out, they may have filled the blind spots of the satellites that failed to keep up with the plane after it lost contact.
See also: Where Is the Plane? 19 Possible Scenarios
"Just tracking one, thin aluminum tube in a place that isn’t heavily radar covered [is] really hard — virtually impossible," Hadfield, an experienced pilot himself, told Mashable shortly after his talk at the TED conference in Vancouver on Monday. "It is not a surprise to me at all how easy it is to make something that big disappear. The world is huge."
Planet Labs, which was founded in 2010 by three former NASA physicists, could have been the answer because their satellites will cover areas that are sometimes overlooked with current satellites — like, say the Indian Ocean — which tend to focus on specific tasks or zones with more activity.
The compact satellites — called "Doves" — will work together to take overlapping images and beam them back to Earth immediately, giving us a complete view of our planet in real time. They will live in low orbit, and their main purpose will be measuring the planet's environmental changes, though their mountains of data could be applied in many other instances, like finding a missing plane perhaps.

Two Earth-imaging satellites were released from the International Space Station on Feb. 11. Called Doves, these are the first of 28 satellites in Flock 1.
Image: Astronaut Koichi Wakata
Although the company launched 28 of these satellites in February, they aren't yet active. Plus, total coverage won't be possible until all 100 satellites are deployed, and the company just secured another round of funding this week to make that happen within 12 months. It will eventually be the largest satellite constellation in history, providing paying clients with information about the planet. When Mashable asked the Planet Labs' team how this information would be used in an extraordinary situation like Flight 370, they remained mum on details.
"We are turning on each of the satellites and are now putting them into position," the spokesperson said. "With this constellation, we will measure the planet on a more regular basis to enable various applications. One of those applications is disaster response, including natural and man-made disasters."
The spokesperson declined to give more details. However, she said the company will announce something "in the near future" that "will answer these questions." Planet Labs founder Will Marshall is set to give his TED Talk on Thursday in Vancouver, where he is expected to discuss his company's satellites and the status of their activation. Furthermore, Marshall met with Hadfield earlier this week, before the astronaut mentioned Planet Labs to Mashable on Monday.
Great chatting to @cmdr_hadfield today about launching @planetlabs satellites from ISS to scan Earth. 'Build it & they will come' he said :)
— Will Marshall (@wsm1) March 17, 2014
More than 11 days after it vanished without warning, the world still has no clue what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which was carrying 239 people. More than 20 countries are now actively involved in the search for the plane.
The total search area has since expanded to nearly 3 million square miles — a huge mass for any human to cover by sea or air. It only seems natural to turn to the many satellites that hover above our atmosphere in search of answers.
NASA has satellites in orbit that track events like heat flashes, but those failed to provide any clues. The agency's MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite, for example, tracks wildfires. So, had MH370 crashed and burned, it seems like this satellite should have seen it. However, the problem is its location.
"They are polar orbiters and would have had to be viewing the exact place and time where the airplane was in order to detect any heat from an explosion — if that's what happened," David J. Diner, senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Mashable via email.
What about the cameras on the ISS? Did they see anything? According to Hadfield, the timing would have had to been perfect in order to capture MH370. That's nearly impossible when you consider that the space station travels at 5 miles per second and speeds over the entire Pacific Ocean in just 25 minutes.
The Chinese government said last week that it would use its satellites to find the missing plane, which was traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and carrying a lot of Chinese passengers. However, a photo array the country released last week that reportedly showed debris from the aircraft turned out to be yet another false lead in the ongoing saga of the still-unsolved Malaysia Airlines mystery.
"Obviously something fast and deliberate happened to that airplane," Hadfield said. "The real question is what."