Page 5 - Side Scan News Today

That are pretty close to that area which could in fact challenge the bluefin. but the information i heard was that it didnt have a problem mapping that six-mile radius circle that weve seen so much of. >> hey, jules, i want to talk about titanic. you were part of the team that discovered the wreckage of "titanic" back in 85. was side-scan sonar used in the search? what equipment ultimately found the wreckage? and i think there was an idea of where "titanic" was, obviously. so it was a little bit...

Also theres serious discussion about the orion, towed side scan sonar device which does everything in realtime. gives greater flexibility and can go to a much greatest depth, too. one of the issues is the area they are searching at the moment is like a plateau, 4.5 thousand meters deep and then it drops to 6,000 miles deep. they need to get more or better assets if the search is to be widened considerably. >> lets talk about the big picture or the long haul so to speak, mary. we know malaysian a...

Much larger area than the area immediately around where the ping was located. i think by the time they search the entire search area, we can safely say its not there. >> geoffrey thomas in perth. you bring new information every evening. you have information on what may happen when the bluefin finishes searching the last search area. what can you tell us of how the underwater search will proceed. >> we have a sense of what they are going to do after the last 20% is possibly go to the area where t...

Deep and did what it was supposed to do and came back up. i dont know if that is a problem. it is called working right there. the prime minister tony abbott said they will exhaust everything there, exhaust everything they need to do as long as they need to take for the bluefin to cover this area. how long do you think that will take? >> you first have to know how big the area is. the side scan can see 1,000 feet to either side and if it is moving four, five miles an hour, you are going to be map...

Because it did what it was supposed to document it went too deep and did what it was supposed to do and came back up. i dont know if that is a problem. it is called working right there. the prime minister tony abbott said they will exhaust everything there, exhaust everything they need to do as long as they need to take for the bluefin to cover this area. how long do you think that will take? >> you first have to know how big the area is. the side scan can see 1,000 feet to either side and if it...

Floor. >> its just remarkable to see it like this. can you get this in one pass? or does it need multiple passes? >> it depends how close the vehicle is to the bottom or how high and big the area is but it could be one pass or multiple passes. >> i want to look at another image from a side-scanning sonar. this is a close-up of one ship. >> this is fantastic. this is the path of the vehicle. so the robot is heading in this direction, sending out pings to either side like this and the sound comes ...

>> this is fantastic. this is the path of the vehicle. the robot is heading in this direction, sending out pings to either side. the side comes and bounces off objects. it is a hard return. a shadow behind it. this is a ship sitting on the bottom and you can see it went over the top of the ship. it leaves a gap beneath the vehicle. why they call it a side scan or side-looking sonar. >> when you get an image like this it is actually two images with the center. >> it is two beams on either side of...

Images might look like. i want to put them up on the screen and have you take us through them. so what are we seeing? >> what you see is almost like -- its called a swath from the side scan but its almost like a highway. you have an image on the left,en an image on the right and a center hope area where you have no data in the middle. thats called the nader gap. what happens is the way the system has to work is it has to do what we call mowing the lawn. it will go forward, take data. it will com...

Is its moved slightly further north. the area they were originally searching in the 40s is much worse seas so that e greatly hampers search efforts. so this area of the seas are a little better, although the winter is coming. in terms of the sea floor in that area, its relatively flat and also relatively old so thats, again, good news in terms of comparing it with the air france flight. thats very young sea floor so it has a lot of lava exposed at the surface. in this older sea floor, what you h...

Travel further. im optimistic for several reasons. one is they have repeated signals theyve detected. and when i say "repeated signal," its not one pulse, its pulses, plural. and the other thing is that they tightened up the area a bit. it still needs to be a smaller area to have effective side scan sonar and sonafication. >> one things searchers have to prepare for is you dont get another ping. lets say the batteries are dead. how big an area are they talking about, then? lets say those are all...