Every day brings new details and new questions surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard that went missing on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
In what is considered to be the first major lead in the search for the missing plane, China's State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) last night published three satellite images.
The images which appear to show three floating objects in the sea were captured just one day after the plane disappeared.
But while the world waits to see if the debris does belong to the missing jet, Chinese authorities and some aviation experts have cautioned against providing false hope.
The Chinese satellite spotted three blips of varying sizes, the largest of which is 24m by 22m. The missing Boeing 777-200ER jet had a wingspan of 60.9 metres and a length of 63.7 metres.
Chinese agency SASTIND gave coordinates of 105.63 east longitude, 6.7 north latitude, which would put it in waters northeast of where MH370 took off in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, south of Vietnam and close to where the plane lost contact with air traffic control.
But Tom Haueter, former aviation director of the US National Transportation Safety Board, was sceptical that the images were connected with the missing jet.
"Any aircraft structure that size would sink. It wouldn't float like this," he said. "I don't believe it's the plane. We don't have enough data to say what happened."
