The international search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which mysteriously disappeared without a trace Mar. 8, has reached outer space.

Several nations have redirected their satellites orbiting the earth to help in the search, while the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is as well providing data from some of its scientific satellites and also a camera on the International Space Station.

Among that large group of high-tech observers are satellites in geostationary orbits that cast their sensors across giant swaths of the planet, even though they suffer a lack the resolution compared to the satellites in lower Earth orbit.

"Weather satellites can see the whole world, but can't see anything much smaller than a hurricane," Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who also runs a Website that tracks all the satellites currently orbiting the planet, said in a report by the Washington Post.

Then again, the closer orbiters are showing their own technological limitations, as many of them can focus on the finite detail of an automotive license plate, but seem virtually blind when trying to identify a missing jet.

The capabilities of satellites are set by physics, along with available funding and money and basic practicality, the Post story notes, and, typically, military and commercial satellites were not designed to monitor and collect information about the not-often traversed areas of the seas -- like the remote part of the Indian Ocean where searchers are now looking for the plane.

The most sophisticated spy satellites are essentially looking down straws, trying to resolve small details in a narrow field of view.

So, there's kind of a trade-off when choosing how to scrutinize the earth's surface from space: either scanning wide or scanning deep, but not both.

"Imagine driving down the street at 70 miles an hour with a pair of binoculars and trying to look at every single mailbox," Brian Weeden, technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to space policy, was also quoted in the Post report.

"You can't slew your binoculars around fast enough ... It's very hard to find something in the middle of the ocean," Weeden said. "We don't know the size and shape of the object we're looking for and there's lots of stuff in the ocean. There's debris from shipping -- containers and other stuff blown overboard. There's natural stuff like trees and everything else."

Bottom line, using earth's cloud of orbiting satellites to scan for the missing airplane might at first sound like a promising venture, said Weeden, but the utter expanse of the planet itself leaves search crews at a great disadvantage, no matter what technology they employ.

"The Earth is big," said Weeden. "The Earth is really big."