DENVER - As the mystery of what happened to the 239 people on board Malaysia flight 370 deepens, a Colorado satellite imaging company is launching an effort to crowdsource the search, asking the public for help analyzing high-resolution images for any sign of the missing airliner. 
 
 Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe trained cameras from its five orbiting satellites Saturday on the Gulf of Thailand region where Malaysia flight 370 was last heard from, said Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe. 
 
 The images being gathered will be made available for free to the public on a website called Tomnod. Anyone can click on the link and begin searching the images, tagging anything that looks suspicious. Each pixel on a computer screen represents half a meter on the ocean's surface, Barrington told ABC News. 
 
 "For people who aren't able to drive a boat through the Pacific Ocean to get to the Malaysian peninsula, or who can't fly airplanes to look there, this is a way that they can contribute and try to help out," Barrington said. 
 
 READ: US to Check Fingerprints of Malaysia Air Passengers With Stolen Passports 
 
 DigitalGlobe will use a computer algorithm to determine whether users start tagging certain regions more than others. In-house satellite imaging experts will follow up on leads, Barrington said. 
 
 "We'll say, 'Here are our top ten suspicious or interesting locations,'" Barrington said. "Is it really an aircraft wing that's been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100 percent sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I'd start." 
 
 READ: What We Know Now About Missing Plane 
 
 The company runs a fee-based First Look Event Service that can compare before-and-after images for clients. In the past month, the company activated the service to observe wildfires in Australia, violence in Ukraine and the aftermath of ice storms in Atlanta, Ga. 
 
 In November, the company launched a similar crowdsourcing campaign after Typhoon Haiyan devastated Southeast Asia. The company says users placed more than 400,000 tags, identifying 38,000 damaged buildings and 101,000 damaged homes. ||||| Residents look at ships anchored Saturday on Phu Quoc island in southern Vietnam, where the plane was presumed lost. ( Le Quang Nhat, AFP/Getty Images ) 
 
 DigitalGlobe is enlisting the crowd to scan and tag images of more than 1,200 square miles of ocean for any visible evidence that could help locate the Malaysia Airlines 777 aircraft that went missing this weekend. 
 
 The Longmont-based earth-imagery company deployed its FirstLook service on Sunday, directing two of its five satellites to snap photos of the area in the Gulf of Thailand, where investigators suspected the plane may have crashed, and then activated its crowdsourcing platform, Tomnod, on Monday afternoon. 
 
 Flight MH370, with 239 people on board, lost communication while on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The missing plane continued to perplex investigators from around the globe three days later. 
 
 "If there is something to see on the surface (of the water), we will see it. But the question is if we are looking in the right area," said Luke Barrington, DigitalGlobe's senior manager of geospatial big data. 
 
 As each new theory led to a new dead end, the company recalibrated its action plan based on the Malaysian government's new area of focus, north and east of oil slicks reported soon after the plane went missing. 
 
 DigitalGlobe activates FirstLook — used by emergency-response agencies in natural disasters, manmade crises and human interest scenarios — about twice a week, while Tomnod is used more selectively and for different reasons, Barrington said. 
 
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 "We try to use the crowd wisely and not tire them out," he said. "The story here is much more about the search than it is about the response. This whole feeling of not knowing, the lack of information or ability to do anything, we have seen time and again, is why people want to get involved." 
 
 Within the first hour Monday afternoon, the Tomnod map had 60,000 page views with more than a thousand tags. Ten minutes later, that was up to nearly 2,000. 
 
 Barrington said that the crowd actually directed the company on this particular crisis, asking for them to deploy Tomnod. 
 
 "The people who come to Tomnod are very motivated to solve problems," Barrington said. "I would say we will have up to 10,000 contributors on this one." 
 
 DigitalGlobe is not the only earth-imagery company capable of delivering high-resolution images, but is arguably the U.S. industry leader. 
 
 "There are an awful lot of assets up in orbit," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at The Teal Group. "There's dozens of earth observation satellites and all of them are very, very capable. If they are taking images, then there's no lack of imagery. And if you haven't been able to spot something by now, then I don't know. It has been three days." 
 
 Kristen Leigh Painter: 303-954-1638, kpainter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kristenpainter ||||| 1 of 12. Lieutenant Clayton Hunt and Lieutenant (junior grade) Nicholas Horton, naval aviators assigned to Patrol Squadron (VP) 16, pilot a P-8A Poseidon during a mission to assist in search and rescue operations for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in this March 24, 2014 handout photo. 
 
 PERTH (Reuters) - An air search of the remote southern Indian Ocean resumed on Friday, seeking to confirm if hundreds of objects spotted by satellites are debris from a Malaysian jetliner presumed to have crashed almost three weeks ago with the loss of all on board. 
 
 A Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 took off from Perth before dawn, heading 2,500 km (1,550 miles) southwest into the search area where high winds and icy weather had halted flights on Thursday. 
 
 The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jet, which vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on a routine flight to Beijing on March 8, has gripped the world and baffled investigators. 
 
 Officials believe someone on board Flight MH370 may have shut off the plane's communications systems before flying it thousands of miles off course where it crashed into the ocean in one of the most isolated and foreboding regions on the planet. 
 
 Theories range from a hijacking to sabotage or a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems. 
 
 The search zone centers on the latest sightings of possible wreckage that were captured by Thai and Japanese satellites in roughly the same frigid expanse of sea as earlier images reported by France, Australia and China. 
 
 "We detected floating objects, perhaps more than 300," Anond Snidvongs, the head of Thailand's space technology development agency, told Reuters. "We have never said that the pieces are part of MH370 but have so far identified them only as floating objects." 
 
 The U.S. Navy said it was sending a second P8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft to help in the search for the missing Boeing 777. 
 
 "It's critical to continue searching for debris so we can reverse-forecast the wind, current and sea state since March 8th to recreate the position where MH370 possibly went into the water," said Commander Tom Moneymaker, a U.S. 7th Fleet oceanographer. 
 
 The United States has also sent a device that can be towed behind a ship to pick up faint pings from the plane's black box voice and data recorders, but time is running out. 
 
 "We've got to get this initial position right prior to deploying the Towed Pinger Locator since the MH370's black box has a limited battery life and we can't afford to lose time searching in the wrong area," Moneymaker said. 
 
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 The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the effort, said it would give details later on the search after flights were halted on Thursday. 
 
 "It's the nature of search and rescue. It's a fickle beast," Flying Officer Peter Moore, the captain of an Australian AP-3C Orion, told Reuters aboard the plane after it turned around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the search zone. 
 
 "This is incredibly important to us. The reality is we have 239 people whose families want some information and closure." 
 
 The objects spotted by the Thai satellite on Monday were between 2 meters (6.5 ft) and 16 meters (52 ft) in size and were in an area around 2,700 km (1,680 miles) southwest of Perth, Snidvongs said. 
 
 The prolonged and so far fruitless search and investigation have taken a toll, with dozens of distraught relatives of 150 Chinese passengers clashing with police and accusing Malaysia of "delays and deception". 
 
 China has repeatedly voiced its frustration with the efforts of Malaysia to find the plane. China's special envoy to Malaysia said on Thursday that Beijing was doing its best to push the Southeast Asian nation to coordinate the international search effort, state news agency Xinhua said. 
 
 Chinese insurance companies have started paying compensation to the families of passengers, Xinhua reported separately. 
 
 A U.S.-based law firm has said it expects to represent families of more than half of the passengers in a lawsuit against the carrier and Boeing, alleging the plane had crashed due to mechanical failure. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Suilee Wee in Beijing, Niluksi Koswanage in Kuala Lumpur, Stanley White in Tokyo and Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Bangkok; Writing by Lincoln Feast and Alex Richardson; Editing by Dean Yates)
– Malaysian authorities seem to have generated nothing but confusion and ill will in the hunt for Flight MH370. Now a Colorado company offers a way for people to do more than vent frustration—they can help scan satellite images, reports the Denver Post. DigitalGlobe wants people to go to its crowdsourcing platform to look at and tag images of the ocean that look promising. An algorithm will then examine results and highlight any areas generating an unusual number of tags, explains ABC News. “We’ll say, ‘Here are our top 10 suspicious or interesting locations,’” says a company official. “Is it really an aircraft wing that’s been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100% sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I’d start." Of course, the satellite images are based on authorities' best guesses on where the plane might be, and those seem to be changing daily.