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Malaysian transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a press conference Australia had spotted two new objects in the southern Indian Ocean in the search for missing MH370
An Australian navy ship was on its way today to retrieve two new objects spotted by military aircraft in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet.
HMAS Success is expected to reach the two objects by tomorrow morning at the latest, Malaysia's government has said, as a mounting number of sightings of floating objects raised hopes wreckage of the plane may soon be found.
So far, ships in the international search effort have been unable to locate several 'suspicious' objects spotted by satellites in grainy images or by fast-flying aircraft over a vast search area in the remote southern Indian Ocean.
'HMAS Success is on scene and is attempting to locate and recover these objects,' Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who called his Malaysia counterpart Najib Razak to inform him of the sighting, said in a statement to parliament.
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Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board on March 8. No confirmed sighting of the plane has been made since and there is no clue what went wrong.
Attention and resources in the search for the Boeing 777 have shifted from an initial focus north of the Equator to an increasingly narrowed stretch of rough sea in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from the original flight path.
Earlier on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency said a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft spotted two 'relatively big' floating objects and several smaller white ones dispersed over several kilometres.
Beijing responded cautiously to the find. 'At present, we cannot yet confirm that the floating objects are connected with the missing plane,' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a news briefing in Beijing.
Australia said that a U.S. Navy plane searching the area on Monday had been unable to locate the objects.
China has diverted its icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, toward the location where the debris was spotted. A flotilla of other Chinese ships are also steadily making their way south. The ships will start to arrive in the area on Tuesday.
Over 150 of the passengers on board the missing plane were Chinese.
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In a further sign the search may be bearing fruit, the U.S. Navy is flying in its high-tech black box detector to the area.
The so-called black boxes - the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder - record what happens on board planes in flight. At crash sites, finding the black boxes soon is crucial because the locator beacons they carry fade out after 30 days.
'If debris is found we will be able to respond as quickly as possible since the battery life of the black box's pinger is limited,' Commander Chris Budde, U.S. Seventh Fleet Operations Officer, said in an emailed statement.
Budde stressed that bringing in the black box detector, which is towed behind a vessel at slow speeds and can pick up 'pings' from a black box to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet, was a precautionary measure.
The Chinese aircraft that spotted the objects was one of two IL-76s searching on Monday. Another eight aircraft, from Australia, the United States and Japan, were scheduled to make flights throughout the day to the search site, some 1,550 miles southwest of Perth.
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'The first object was rectangular in shape and slightly below the ocean. The second object was circular, also slightly below the ocean. We came across a long cylindrical object that was possibly two meters long, 20 cm across.
'Everyone is quite hyped.'
Australia was also analysing French radar images showing potential floating debris that were taken some 850 km (530 miles) north of the current search area.
Australia has used a U.S. satellite image of two floating objects to frame its search area. A Chinese satellite has also spotted an object floating in the ocean there, estimated at 22 metres long (74ft) and 13 metres (43ft) wide.
It could not be determined easily from the blurred images whether the objects were the same as those detected by the Australian and Chinese search planes, but the Chinese photograph could depict a cluster of smaller objects, said a military officer from one of the 26 nations involved in the search.
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NASA said it would use high-resolution cameras aboard satellites and the International Space Station to look for possible crash sites in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. space agency is also examining archived images collected by instruments on its Terra and Aqua environmental satellites.
Investigators believe someone on the flight shut off the plane's communications systems. Partial military radar tracking showed it turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.
That has led them to focus on hijacking or sabotage, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems. Faint electronic 'pings' detected by a commercial satellite suggested it flew for another six hours or so, but could do no better than place its final signal on one of two vast arcs north and south.
While the southern arc is now the main focus of the search, Malaysia says efforts will continue in both corridors until confirmed debris is found.
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But it was unclear whether Commander Hidetsugu Iwamasa had yet had a full briefing on the latest sighting today.
Commander Iwamasa said, according to Japanese media on the tarmac at Pearce: 'We shared some information with China, but I cannot go into detail.'
'We will do our best.'
The French satellite image was earlier thought to have been much closer to areas of the Indian Ocean where Australia and China provided satellite photographs of objects that could be debris from MH370.
That it is some 530 miles away has prompted Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss to describe the search operation as 'clutching' at information, as flight and sea crews embarked on their fifth day of sweeps in the target zone.
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'That's not in the area that had been identified as the most likely place where the aircraft may have entered the sea. But having said all that we've got to check out all the options.
'We're just, I guess, clutching at whatever little piece of information comes along to try and find a place where we might be able to concentrate the efforts.'
Mr Truss added authorities still didn't 'know for certain' if any of the objects spotted by satellite thus far were related to MH370, which mysteriously disappeared on March 8.
He said weather conditions were also complicated Monday by Tropical Cyclone Gillian, a powerful storm to the north of the search zone that is likely to hamper a full day's search efforts.
'It is a very difficult task,' he added.
AMSA confirmed weather conditions were difficult Monday, as search teams re-commenced targeted sweeps of the Indian Ocean.
'The weather forecast in the search area is expected to deteriorate with rain likely,' AMSA said.
'Today's search is split into two areas within the same proximity covering a cumulative 68,500 square kilometres.
'HMAS Success remains in the search area. A number of Chinese ships are en route to the search area to assist in the location of objects possibly related to the search.'
Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas told the MailOnline The US military KC-10 extender tanker - an aerial refuelling aircraft - would be joining the search fleet, in particular to assist the US Navy P8 Poseidon aircraft, which is out on mission today.
The two Russian made Ilyuchin IL-76 aircraft deployed by the Chinese government flew from Pearce airbase to Perth airport and off to the target area early Monday.
Mr Thomas said the Ilyuchins, which were used by Australian forces in Afghanistan to deliver supplies and ordnance, needed the longer Perth international runway for take-off once they were fully loaded with fuel for maximum flight capacity.
'The IL-76s will use Perth airport as their take-off point for the length of this search,' he said.
The Ilyuchin planes are also designed as airborne refueling craft, and have been used by China as emergency response planes, evacuating Chinese citizens out of Libya in 2011.
Meanwhile, it was claimed that police have seized the personal financial records of all 12 crew members of the flight MH370 - including bank statements, mortgage documents and credit card bills.
Air and sea searches since last Thursday in a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean to determine whether the objects were from the missing jet have been unsuccessful.
Malaysia's Ministry of Transport said the images had been sent to Australia, which is coordinating the search about 1,550 miles south-west of Perth.
The images could be another clue in the growing mystery over Flight 370, with the search moving from seas off Vietnam when the plane first went missing to areas now not far from the Antarctica.
