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posted by martyb on Monday November 20 2017, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the horrible-way-to-go dept.

The US Navy and NASA have joined the search for an Argentine Armada (navy) diesel-electric attack submarine—the ARA San Juan (S-42)—and its crew of 44 sailors missing in the Southern Argentine Sea. The last contact with the TR-1700 class sub, built in 1983 by the German shipbuilder Thyssen Nordseewerke, was on November 15.

NASA has dispatched a modified P-3 Orion patrol plane—previously used by the Navy for submarine hunting—to aid in the search. The P-3 is equipped with a magnetic anomaly detector (or magnetometer), a gravimeter for detecting small fluctuations in the Earth's gravity, infrared cameras, and other sensors for measuring ice thickness. With that array, the P-3 may be able to detect the submerged submarine.

[...] The NASA P-3 joins three Argentine Armada ships in the search—the destroyer ARA Sarandí (D-13) and two corvettes, ARA Rosales (P-42) and ARA Drummond (P-31). Reuters reports that Argentine naval spokesman Enrique Balbi told reporters today, "We are investigating the reasons for the lack of communication [with the submarine]. If there was a communication problem, the boat would have to come to the surface." The submarine was traveling from Ushuaia to Mar del Plata, and it was expected to stay on course regardless of communications. The lack of any sighting or contact led to a request for assistance from NASA.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/nasa-icebridge-flying-lab-aids-in-search-for-missing-argentine-navy-sub/

The search has been hampered by bad weather and 20-foot waves.


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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday November 21 2017, @12:27AM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday November 21 2017, @12:27AM (#599459) Journal

    May have recorded sounds of tools banging on the hull

    http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/americas/argentina-missing-submarine/index.html [cnn.com]

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Tuesday November 21 2017, @03:58AM

    by anubi (2828) on Tuesday November 21 2017, @03:58AM (#599523) Journal

    Sure seems odd to me that we have signal acquisition technology that allows us to sense milliwatts of power transmission by our space probes beyond our solar system, yet we do not have the technology to detect a sunken sub ( or airplane ) from nearly anywhere on earth?

    We have extremely noise-resilient techniques which use statistics and integration to get tremendous sensitivity at the expense of bandwidth. So, all we get is vessel ID and location data. That's all we need. Once locked onto its carrier ( likely a pseudorandom spread spectrum running in the same frequencies whales would use to communicate for thousands of miles [cornell.edu] ), we could use beamforming techniques at the receiver to tell us where the transmitter is.

    I used to work with sonobouys... which listened and triangulated onto submarines. They appeared to me to be capable of being modified to have far more sensitivity if they were listening for a specific thing that repeated over and over, by using a hybrid spread-spectrum and "lock-in amplifier" technique. But I never got a chance to pursue that before the company I was working for was bought and we techies were expendable.

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