A top secret U.S. Navy system
The US Navy’s top-secret acoustic detection system heard the TITAN SUBMERSIBLE’s explosion, officials told the Wall Street Journal. According to the report, the system, which is designed to detect enemy submarines, first heard the explosion hours after the ship began its journey.
The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and identified an anomaly related to the explosion in the general vicinity of the submarine Titan’s operating location when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official said in a statement to Wall Street Magazine.
Although this information was not definitive, it was immediately shared with the incident commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue operation.” The missing Titanic submarine exploded, killing five people on board just 200 meters from the Titanic’s wreckage, officials said Thursday.
US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a press conference that debris found on the seabed by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) earlier in the day was “consistent with a catastrophic collapse of the vessel.” Mauger said the families of those on board were notified immediately.
The exact cause and time of the explosion are still being explained. According to the authorities, the position of the ship was stable when the ship last made contact with the ground on Sunday morning. Although debris was found near the bow of the Titanic, officials did not believe that the submersible fell into the wreck, but instead exploded in the water column above the seabed.
The ROV found Titan’s nose cone, the front and rear ends of the “pressure body”, and two “debris fields”, one larger and one smaller, which are still being analyzed. The submarine Titan disappeared on Sunday morning when it lost contact with its support vessel after an hour and 45-minute voyage to investigate the wreckage of the Titanic. The Titan was a 21-foot OceanGate Expeditions vessel.
The “Cyclops-class” vehicle had a single port for observation and was designed to take high-paying clients on deep-sea adventures. There was one pilot and four passengers on board. The pilot was OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, an aerospace engineer and jet pilot. Among the passengers were British pilot Hamish Harding, retired French naval commander and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, the youngest person on board
.