Help find Steve Fossett

The millionaire aviator has been missing since September 3rd after departing alone in a single-engine Bellanca aircraft from an airstrip 80 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada.

Using satellite imagery drawn from multiple organizations and Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a crowdsourcing platform), individuals around the world are helping to scour images for Fossett's plane.

Mechanical Turk is a web service that allows for the rapid assembly of a large human workforce to tackle tasks that are better suited for people than computers. In this case, the job is to look for a 30x20 pixel airplane in over 12 thousand satellite photos. A digital needle in the haystack.

The digital search is similar to one conducted for a well known computer scientist Jim Gray who was lost at sea earlier this year.

You can join the hunt here.