Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 went missing in the early hours of Saturday, March 8, and other than satellite images of debris floating in the Indian Ocean, officials are still at a loss for what could have caused the airplane to disappear. For some, the hope now rests with locating the plane's black box, the indestructible object kept in cockpits that records hundreds of data parameters and flight conditions.
According to ABC News, however, black boxes only have enough battery life to transmit locator signals for about a month, which means that if MH370 did crash into the Indian Ocean several hundred miles off the western coast of Australia, only about two weeks remain before it loses the energy to ping its location. Malaysian authorities believe they have narrowed their efforts to a new area of open water, but the U.S. Navy is now stepping in to provide technical expertise in the search for the missing plane's black box.
A ping and a prayer
Cmdr. William Marks, spokesman for the 7th Fleet, said in a statement that one of Navy's Towed Pinger Locator machines was scheduled to arrive in the search area on March 26, Stars and Stripes reported. Along with another unmanned underwater vehicle, these two pieces of equipment may provide the best chance of finding the MH370 in the narrowed search area yet.
The Towed Pinger Locator 25 is dropped into the water behind a moving ship and listens for any underwater activity from submerged black boxes. The TPL can effectively pick up a signal of a black box at more than 20,000 feet.
The bla will also be joined by a Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle that features technology to map out the ocean floor. The Bluefin-21 AUV can travel at a maximum speed of 4.5 knots and can dive as low as 14,700 feet for 25 hours.
New search area
In tandem, these two pieces of equipment promise to find any answers that may be hidden in the multinational search effort's new area of focus 1,700 miles west of Perth, Australia, NBC News reported.
Thai satellite images may have found evidence of man-made debris floating on the water's surface, but analysts were unable to determine the objects' origin. Though no official word has come from Malaysian officials or any other country involved in the search efforts, this debris field is only 125 miles southwest of the predicted crash site.