A satellite scanning the Indian Ocean for remnants of the missing jetliner found a debris field littered with 122 objects, a top Malaysian official said Wednesday, calling it “the most credible lead that we have.”
Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the objects were more than 1,550 miles southwest of Australia, near where other satellites had previously spotted debris. The objects ranged in length from a yard to about 25 yards.
Hishammuddin said the latest images were taken Sunday and relayed by French-based Airbus Defense and Space, a division of Europe’s Airbus Group, which operates and monitors satellite communications.
Assorted floating objects have been spotted by planes and satellites over the past week — but so far there has been no confirmation that they came from the Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished on March 8.
Also on Wednesday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority sent a tweet saying three more objects had been spotted.
The authority said two objects seen from a civil aircraft appeared to be rope, and that a New Zealand military plane spotted a blue object.
None of the objects was seen on a second pass, a frustration that has been repeated several times in the hunt for Flight MH370, which officials said crashed in the southern Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard.
“If it is confirmed to be MH370, at least we can then move on to the next phase of deep sea surveillance search,” Hishammuddin said.
The desperate, multinational hunt resumed Wednesday across a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean after fierce winds and high waves that forced a daylong halt Tuesday eased considerably.
A total of 12 planes and five ships from the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand were participating in the search, hoping to find even a single piece of the jet that could offer tangible evidence of a crash.
The new data greatly reduced the search zone, but it remains huge — an area estimated at 622,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers), about the size of Alaska.