QUEENSLAND, May 20 — The Bluefin-21, the autonomous underwater vehicle tasked with scanning the ocean floor for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, is awaiting spare parts at the Australian port of Geraldton before it can resume its mission.
The parts, which are being imported from the United Kingdom, are needed to repair the Bluefin, as well as transponders on its mothership, the Ocean Shield. A hardware fault on the transponders affects communication between the two vessels and has brought the search to a standstill, with the Bluefin conducting only two hours of scanning since May 2.
The damage to the submersible and the transponders extending over the side of the Ocean Shield was inflicted when the Bluefin-21 was hoisted onto the deck of the Ocean Shield last week.
Meanwhile, the Chinese survey ship Zhu Kezhen is scheduled to sail for the area tomorrowto conduct a bathymetric survey to gauge the ocean’s depth relative to the sea level in the area.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Robin Beaman, a marine biologist at James Cook University, expressed hope that the missing plane would be located. “It’s unlikely that it will be buried in anything that’s drifting down from above,” said Beaman.
The mud covering the search area was firm enough to walk on, and only a millimetre of extra sediments is deposited on the ocean bed every thousand years, Beaman said. — Reuters
