Does a system exist that can bulk process satellite data to find a plane lost over ocean? The case of the lost Malaysian Airlines plane is tragic for all those involved. 

In the case of such a plane lost over the ocean, hypothetically (and described very simplistically), it would seem that the fastest way to search for wreckage would be:


to define an area to be searched
wait for the latest satellite images for that area at high-resolution to be available (given appropriate positioning and programming of the satellites)
then search the captured imagery for deviations from ocean blue


Presumably this could be done reasonably quickly by a computer, and that satellite imagery is taken after a suspected crash, and exceptions (e.g. spots of white amongst the blue) are able to be verified by a human.

Does such a system exist? Are imaging satellites able to be configured to take such imagery on demand over a large area? And do such batch-image processing systems exist for this purpose?
Update: Satellites were eventually used in the search for MA370, see this article.



This question might be better answered by the folks at space exploration but here's a shot:


Oil slicks are not uncommon at sea, so finding one from the aircraft is not too easy.
It's an incredibly large area pulling a lot of processing power. You're going to need pretty good resolution imagery over several square kilometers and then run image recognition on it. Look at this image which has a scale of 25 miles which is still a fraction of what you would need to get an idea:





The fragments you're looking for are very small in regards to waves. I suspect depending on where you are there's a large amount of noise from other rubbish which is hard to filter out, such as a white plastic sheet to a door. You might even go confusing big aircraft parts to other white boats. Yes, you can continue the search but it takes time to go through all of these and dismiss them.
A lot of volunteers searched for Steve Fossett when he went missing, and there was some attempts to locate him by satellite imagery from google maps, which was not successful.
Aircraft, while not fast, can be over the side within a few hours, while I think you have to wait until the satellites have caught all the imagery you would like.


While I think it could be done as you say, you would need to develop software and I don't think the market for it exists, but that's just my guess. Reading up it appears that satellites are used against drug cartels along the USA-Mexico border and against illegal immigrants elsewhere in the world.