The object found off the coast of Mozambique, which is suspected to be debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, is being sent to Australia for testing, officials said on Thursday. The fragment of suspected aircraft wreckage will be tested by investigators in Australia with help from Malaysian authorities and representatives of Boeing, the manufacturer of the aircraft that went missing nearly two years ago. The piece of metal, which could be from the Boeing 777’s horizontal stabilizer – the wing-like part attached to the tail – was found by an American who has been blogging about the search for the missing jet.

Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester said the object was discovered “in a location consistent with drift modelling commissioned by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau”, but it was “too early to speculate on the origin of the debris”. This comes days before the second anniversary of the plane’s disappearance. On March 8, 2014, Flight MH370 was en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board when it went missing.

In a separate development, families of MH370 passengers on Thursday appealed to authorities to continue the search for the missing plane beyond the expected mid-year completion date, AFP reported. Investigators had said earlier that the search will end by mid-2016 if no “credible new information” surfaced. Voice370, a group representing these families, said in a statement that continuing the search “would help make aviation safer” if the cause of the aircraft’s disappearance can be identified. It added that “not knowing” had prevented family members from “moving on”.