A Chinese ship equipped with advanced sonar equipment is soon to join the search for the Malaysian airliner believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean almost two years ago, an official said yesterday.
The Dong Hai Jiu 101 is to depart Singapore tomorrow to join the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 over a 120,000km2 expanse of deep seabed by late next month, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said.
The ship is equipped with a state-of-the-art synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), which some experts say is more accurate than standard 75 kilohertz side-scan sonar systems that have been used to scan most of the area searched so far.
With standard acoustic sonar, the image becomes less clear the farther a seabed object is from the equipment.
However, with SAS, the image remains sharp regardless of an object’s distance.
Fugro Survey, the Dutch underwater survey company hired by Australia to find the Boeing 777, has defended its choice of sonar and maintains the search has been thorough.
Fugro search director Paul Kennedy has described SAS as a developing technology with some questions about its reliability. As the search was in such a remote region, Fugro opted for established technology with ready supplies of spare parts.
ONGOING EXPEDITION
The Dong Hai Jiu 101 is to join two Fugro ships, Fugro Discovery and Fugro Equator, which are to continue to search with standard sonar equipment.
The Fugro Discovery lost its sonar unit and 4.5km of cable last weekend when the ship towed the equipment into an underwater volcano.
The ship was headed back to the Australian port of Fremantle to collect new cable to deploy with a spare sonar unit.
A fourth ship, Havila Harmony, is equipped with a maneuverable deep-sea drone that has been fitted with a camera and high-resolution sonar for searching difficult terrain and for taking a closer look at potential clues.
The drone was also recently damaged when it struck a fishing net, but has been repaired.
The ProSAS-60 sonar equipment aboard the Chinese ship is to be operated by marine services companies Phoenix International Holdings, based in Maryland, and Seattle-based Hydrospheric Solutions.
Both companies gained experience searching for Flight MH370 when they operated Go Phoenix, a ship that was contracted by Malaysia to take part in the search for eight months until June last year.
More than 85,000km2 of the search area have been scoured since late 2014.
The Chinese ship’s participation marks the first time China has agreed to share the financial cost of the search with Malaysia and Australia.
Truss yesterday thanked China for the contribution.
Most of the 239 people aboard Flight MH370 were Chinese.
The airplane vanished on March 8, 2014, after mysteriously flying far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
A wing component found in July last year on the other side of the Indian Ocean when it washed up on Reunion Island is the only verified debris to have been recovered.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS