Perth,A mini-sub hunting for missing
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will be back in the search zone within days, an
official said Saturday, as the Australian ship carrying the device prepared to
leave on the mission.
Australian
vessel Ocean Shield is carrying the US Navy Bluefin-21 mini-sub which had been
scouring the seabed for the plane which disappeared on March 8 carrying 239
people until it docked to resupply early this week.
Ocean Shield was
due to head back Saturday to the remote area of the Indian Ocean where
transmissions believed to have come from the plane's black box recorders were
heard last month, a journey expected to take three days.
Once in the area,
Ocean Shield will be able to deploy the Bluefin-21 to look for "any
non-normal items, any metallic items", US Navy Captain Mark Matthews told
the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"They'll
either find something or they won't, that's about all I can box in, but what
you do is you go look at your best indications and you pursue them until they're
exhausted," he said.Matthews said it was impossible to know for sure
whether the signals picked up were from the plane's black box.
"It is
certainly a man-made signal, but what it's from, I can't look at it and
positively say, 'Hey that's an underwater locator beacon'," he said.Extensive
air and sea searches over vast stretches of the Indian Ocean have failed to
find any sign of MH370 which mysteriously diverted from its Kuala Lumpur to
Beijing route and is thought to have crashed far off Australia's west coast.
Australia, which is
leading the search, has stressed that it believes it is looking in the right
area based on satellite communications from the plane.
Officials have
scaled back the air and sea searches, and have said that an intensified
undersea mission will begin once new, more sophisticated equipment can be
obtained to search at depths of more than 4,500 metres (15,000 feet).The ocean
bed in the prospective search zone is several kilometres deep and largely
unmapped, meaning specialist sonar equipment and other autonomous vehicles are
needed.Until these can be deployed, the Bluefin-21 will continue the search
while oceanographic work will also be done.
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