MOSCOW. July 23 (Interfax-AVN) - Not a single civil spacecraft flew over southeastern Ukraine, where the Malaysian Boeing-777 crashed, the ScanEx satellite observation company told Interfax-AVN on Tuesday.
"According to the ballistic assessment of flight time of civil spacecraft remote probing above the Snizhne area [Ukraine], it is visible that U.S. and French satellites flew over the crash site on July 17 in the morning between 11.35 a.m. Moscow time and 12.57 p.m. Moscow time, KOMPSAT-3 and EROS-B satellites at 2.33 p.m. and 3.35 p.m. respectively. The latter one was almost two hours prior to the catastrophe," a ScanEx representative said.
Civil satellite remote probing, which carries out optic filming with sub-meter spatial resolution usually use morning sun-synchronous orbits, the representative said. This means that they fly above the shooting area approximately at the same local time - usually between 9 a.m. and noon. The shooting is normally planned in advance, place, time, angle and territory of the filming is set, this refers in particular to satellites of the United States, France, Russia, Spain and other countries, the representative said.
Day (after-noon) sun-synchronous orbits are used relatively seldom and EROS-B (Israel) and KOMPSAT-3 (Korea) operate them, the company representative said.
The flight trajectory of such spacecraft, including the U.S. ones, can be calculated using observational results of amateur astronomers, the representative said.
According to the representative, when the Boeing crashed, only a U.S. intelligence satellite launched in 2001 was the closest to the scene.