Crowdsourcing is playing a central role in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished on March 8, 2014.

The Boeing 777, which disappeared while heading from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, had 239 people aboard. Despite an exhaustive search for the plane over the past year, no trace of it has been found.

In an attempt to solve the mystery, 18 scientists and mathematicians around the world put their collective expertise together and calculated the most likely place the plane crashed.

Based on those calculations, search efforts have been moved south from the original site where ships thought they'd detected pings from one of the plane's black boxes, to a spot further south and west of Australia.

Michael Exner is a satellite scientist in Colorado who helped build some the satellites being used in the hunt for MH370. He describes how satellite data and other information has been incorporated into the crowdsourced calculations of MH370's potential crash site.

Gallery: The search for Flight MH370