Page 11 - Side Scan News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

And more detail. they'll mow the grass, as we say. keep going back and forth, building up a map. here's data that we already collected earlier today. as we're going along, recording more data. it's a higher level of detail than what we were looking at. they have a myriad of tools as they get more and more detail on the wreck site. >> reporter: if you figured out where that debris field was, if you're looking for that and you found that, you would do this to map out where the bigger pieces are, how to pull those up? >> right. progressively working more detail until able to get camera on all dif...

Vehicle. why not? >> that's correct. the sensors, there's two different sensor packages. there's a sonar sensor package that has side scan and some other sonars and the camera is in a separate payload. that is done because when you are doing a camera survey you are flying closer to the bottom, approximately five meters off the bochlt at that height the sonar return and imaging is not as good. no sense in having the sonars on the platform at that time because the two sensors operate from different altitudes. >> australian officials say they are not going to deploy it until or unless they get an...

It was considered a hail mary pass, a last ditch effort and low and behold it did find something over the weekend. now comes the hard part. they have got to go back over the area where they detected this. they have got to reacquire the signal. it's going to take parallel runs and perpendicular runs so they can home in on it, triangulate it. and the animation that you're looking at now, that's another device that they're going to deploy. that is blue fin 21 which is going to go down and take pictures and side scan sonar images of the area where they heard the pings and try to map out a debris f...

Of ocean one at a time and work their way through it. but it's going to be very slow and methodical work. >> and presumably, arnold, if it's getting closer and closer to the relatively tiny black boxes, the wreckage presumably is not all that far away, right? >> exactly. the black boxes are in the tail of the aircraft and should be right near to the wreckage. >> and so there is equipment that would see that wreckage at some point if they were investigating a relatively small area? >> yes. side scan sonar is really adept at really picking up wreckage and you can with side scan sonar see tail, i...

Operations and submersibles specialist. colonel michael kay, former uk military pilot and cnn aviation analyst. tim, you've joined the panel since the last hour. and you've brought with you a very significant prop. better known as an auv. explain how this is significant in what's happening on the other side of the world. >> actually, this is more than a prop. it is an actual auv. it just is a shallow water version. when we talk shallow water we're talking 200 meters, 650 feet. so it will actually go down on its own and it will use its side scan to map the ocean bottom. >> effectively what we'r...