"Inmarsat, which is feeding into the official investigation, spent the weekend reviewing all of its flight MH370 data.
Doppler effect
In particular, it examined the frequency spectrum of the ping transmissions and how they differed with pings emitted from previous Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flights.
This allowed engineers to model how the frequency might change very slightly as a plane travels through the sky.
This is the famous Doppler effect, which acts to "stretch" or "compress" radio waves emanating from moving objects. With a moving police car, the equivalent sound effect is to change the pitch of the siren.
The analysis is cutting-edge and has never been done before, but it has enabled Inmarsat's engineers to confirm that the southerly arc was the path taken by flight MH370.
The analysis tells us nothing about the location of the ill-fated plane. It tells us nothing about the altitude the plane flew, other than it was airborne.
Comment:
If the exact frequency of the MH-370 transmission is known, and compared with the intercepted value, you can, by applying the cosine values of estimates for the offset angle from the location of the satellite to the assumed course of flight MH-370 (180), approximate speed. Depending on the accuracy of the intercept time, you can do the same
thing and derive a position if you have three satellites involved. You also may be able to do that by using sequential intercepts by one satellite at different positions along its orbit. It will be interesting to see how much further Inmarsat takes the application of Doppler which, as we all should know. is a wonderful method for the derivation of refined data.
The only good my degree in English from UVA did was to teach me how to write the declarative sentence. The rest of my four years in Charlottesville was a waste of time apart from social aspects. Had it not been for my assignment to the "System," I'd probably have spent my entire working life teaching at some small prep-school in the boonies. Shudder!!!
