Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz just sent a message on the Mechanical Turk’s effort to help find missing adventurer Steve Fossett. Fossett went missing on September 3 while flying over the Nevada desert. Satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts (he did not file a flight plan) and Mechanical Turk HITs have been set up to review those images.

The link will be live for one week. You have 60 minutes to work on each HIT. The HITs are small squares of satellite images that you have to review for unusual objects. Examples are provided for you; if you want to get a closer view of the image, you’re given a coordinate to use in Google Earth. With each hit, you either report that you have seen nothing unusual or you report any strange objects — a space is provided for comments.

Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for tasks that require human intelligence. These tasks are called “HITs”, ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’.

Before you can start working on Mechanical Turk HITs, you will need to complete a short registration process. If you are already an Amazon.com customer, you can sign-in using the same email address and password you use at Amazon.

Good luck and spread the word!