10 September 2007
Amazon.com is asking for help in tracing Steve Fossett – from your PC.
The famed explorer and record holder has been missing for nearly a week now, having taken off last Monday from a small airstrip in Nevada apparently to try to find a potential site for a world land speed record. He never returned, and despite an intensive search involving ground crews and up to a reported 45 aircraft, no trace has been found of the aircraft.
In a remarkable use of technology Amazon has activated the Mechanical Turk, a system which uses satelite imagery supplied to DigitalGlobe to Google Earth. The system breaks the area of the search into small chunks, allowing people at home to examine small squares of Nevada, and flag up anything interesting if they see it.
The imagery currently in use in the area was uploaded to Google Earth on Saturday, so should be new enough to carry any potential Fossett site. If you’re intending to help out, and you have Google Earth already (and if you don’t have it, why not get it? It’s <a href=’http://earth.google.com/’ target=’_blank’>free!</a>) you need to follow a few simple steps to make sure that the imagery you have is up-to-date, but once you’ve got it, it should help you to see details more clearly.
The search so far – on the ground and in the virtual world – has discovered six crashed aircraft, none of them Fossett’s.
For more information on Amazon’s Fossett Mechanical Turk, visit <a href=’http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60&kw=story’ target=’_blank’>here</a>.
