about 3 miles a minute, about 200 feet. you can see what s happening, the sonobuoy is deploying into the water. it s breaking up into three or four episodes. it absolutely is. you have a little parachute that comes out and sits below the water. it has an antenna on the top and the parachute is opening and the antenna will talk to the p3 when it goes into its orbit. below, you see the hydrophone and it will drop below the surface and listen for those black box pinks and do that around eight hours. that s what s so bizarre, this remarkable technology we just watches from start to finish, it dies and sinks in eight hours. that s it? the life of this machine is eight hours? it is. we have to remember the p3 carries around 84 of these per
it s sensing everything. so the fact that we got a ping tells you a good place to go with the ocean shield to start looking deeper. professor stupples, how is the listening technology on these buoys different than what the ship is using to pick up the pings? well, the towed ping locator is very much more sensitive than this bouoy. the buoy contains a hydrophone. that is not to say that it hasn t picked up a ping from the locator. and david, the big question now, investigators have said these signals have the potential of being from a manmade source. uh-huh. i think we agreed last night that it s hard to imagine what they could be other than the black boxes. but what could it be? well, the only thing that i looked i did research to try and find out. the only thing i found out was
hydrophone, and this towed pinger locator. these pings are all in about a 500-square-mile area. it s a vast area. despite what it looks like on the map. let me show you the video, the animation of what the towed pinger locator does. it moves through the water at about a depth of two miles or so, listening for any pings. this is the device that has now picked up four separate sets of pings. they believe that those pings are coming potentially from the black box, which is at a depth of about three miles, or almost three miles down. if they can triangulate the pings, which is what they re working on right now, the next step will be to drop down this underwater autonomous submarine called the bluefin 21. it will use sonar to map the ocean s surface. that is a very big job, because as we said, we re talking about potentially 500 square miles. and it is pitch black down there. so lights don t even work very well. they ve got to use sonar, which is essentially bouncing sound
engineering. fred, welcome. hi, brooke, how you doing? thanks for having me. thank you for coming on. let s begin with the sonar buoys. how do they work? well, the sonar buoys have been used for submarine reconnaissance for quite a number of years. what they do, the main idea behind them is you drop them down behind an aircraft. they have a long, say 1,000 foot cable with a hydro phone on the end of it. the idea behind that is near the surface of the water you have all of these thermal layers and those layers are going to really make havoc with your acoustic signals. they will bend the sound much like a prism will bend light. you want to get below them so you get clear direct signals from the source that you want to
promising new developments in the race to find missing malaysian flight 370. on day 33 of the search, we are now learning australian teams have detected a new underwater signal in the same area of the indian ocean where four previous pings were picked up. there s still a long way to go. hope only gets us so far. tom costello is in washington for us tracking all of these latest developments, as always. tom, what have you got? we have a fifth ping. this was picked up by an underwater buoy dropped by an australian air force plane, with a hydrophone that can listen 1,000 feet underwater. it s dangling 1,000 feet underwater. this is about 1,000 miles or so off the coast of australia, in this area right here. this is the exact same area where they picked up other pings, other pings that were picked up by, as you probably know already, by the ship ocean shield pulling along this