Black box locator is days away from new search zone
- 10 years ago
It's a race against time, as this Australian ship is fitted with a high tech black box locator supplied by the US navy.
The towed pinger locator, as its known, uses its highly sensitive listening equipment to detect any ultrasonic signals - "pings" - emitted from aircraft flight recorders.
It's hoped it will be able to find the black box from the Malaysia airlines jet, which disappeared on March 8th.
Pulled underwater behind a ship, the locator operates from a depth of about 6,000 metres.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) US NAVY SUPERVISOR OF SALVAGE AND DIVING, CAPTAIN MARK MATTHEWS SAYING:
"Once we do get a detection with the towed pinger locator, we would then deploy the Artemis, the under water vehicle here. Its an autonomous, it's basically a robot that can be programmed to go take a sonar mapping of the debris field. So we can properly identify where all the debris is. Once that's done we will swap one of the assemblies out with a camera unit and we do a full
The towed pinger locator, as its known, uses its highly sensitive listening equipment to detect any ultrasonic signals - "pings" - emitted from aircraft flight recorders.
It's hoped it will be able to find the black box from the Malaysia airlines jet, which disappeared on March 8th.
Pulled underwater behind a ship, the locator operates from a depth of about 6,000 metres.
(SOUNDBITE) (English) US NAVY SUPERVISOR OF SALVAGE AND DIVING, CAPTAIN MARK MATTHEWS SAYING:
"Once we do get a detection with the towed pinger locator, we would then deploy the Artemis, the under water vehicle here. Its an autonomous, it's basically a robot that can be programmed to go take a sonar mapping of the debris field. So we can properly identify where all the debris is. Once that's done we will swap one of the assemblies out with a camera unit and we do a full