CNN news 2014-03-23 加文本

cnn news 2014-03-23

CARL AZUZ, cnn ANCHOR: There are many theories about what happened to a missing Malaysia Airlines plane, but confirmed information is hard to come by. We`ll tell you what we know today on cnn STUDENT NEWS.

It`s been 13 days since the flight with 239 people aboard vanished over Southeast Asia. There are 26 countries involved in the search. The area is almost 3 million square miles from Eastern Europe to the Southern Indian Ocean. It even extends to the pilot`s house. A flight simulator was there, and yesterday, Malaysian officials said some files have been deleted from its hard drive. Investigators are trying to recover those to see if they hold any clues, though it could be just another dead end. U.S. officials say the aircraft`s most likely location is the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

TOM FOREMAN, cnn CORRESPONDENT: The big complete area is still enormous. You are still talking about an area around the size of the United States. But the area they are focused on most today is about the size of Arizona. Remember, we`ve talked about these two arcs out here, the northern and southern arcs. This is along the southern arcs. And they are specifically focused on this area about 1400 miles or so away from the West Coast of Australia. This is a moving target, by the way. This was bigger yesterday. You put it on the floor now. And it was a little bit further to the West, but because of drifting patterns and things like that, they adjusted with the hours. This is all based on something from mathematics called Bayesian theory, which is basically saying, as all of your parameters change hour to hour, day to day in a search, you adjust the probability of where you will find it. And now that equation has led them to focus most on this area.

And one of the reasons we know they are focusing on it so far or so hard right now, is this, this airplane. This is the P8 Poseidon, it`s made by the Navy, or the Navy has them out there. This is the result of a $35 billion program. Each plane costs around a quarter billion dollars. And many people consider this the most effective sub-hunting plane in the world now because when it looks down at all this water, which you and I would look at with our eyes, we would see sunlight glinting off, and making it hard for us to see things. And we might see white caps. And all sorts of things that make it visually hard to see something. It uses radar to scan many, many, many miles of this. Thousands in a day to spot even little tiny items. So, the fact that this plane, this quarter billion dollar plane has been moved down to search that specific area, shows you that their sense of probability that it could be one of the more important search areas has reason substantially. It doesn`t mean they are going to find anything, but it means they think they might fight debris on the surface. But remember, even if you find something on the surface, even if all the calculations by NTSB and everybody else says it should be down here somewhere, if you find something, the bigger challenge lies ahead, because this plane vanished over about 200 feet of water. But if you fly into this part of the Indian Ocean, and you keep going down below the surface, look what you get - you get the kind of topography that you would get on the surface. A geography of hills and ridges and valleys and all sorts of places where that pinger that they might search for could be difficult to locate.

AZUZ: The families of the missing are in anguish. They are frustrated with the lack of search progress. Some accused the Malaysian government of withholding information. There is some technology that was launched too late to help with this incident. But astronaut Chris Hadfield describes how it could help in the future.

CHRIS HADFIELD, RETIRED CANADIAN ASTRONAUT: Five weeks ago, the space station released 28 little tiny satellite cameras that are now orbiting the world. They are about the size of a long skinny shoebox. And each of them goes around the world every 90 minutes, and they can see things down maybe to about the size of a car.

The beauty of those will be, they will take a picture of basically every second, and you go five miles a second. So, every five miles they will take a picture of the world and continuously stream that information back to us, giving us a look at the planet like we`ve never before.