The undersea drone deployed to assist in the search for missing flight MH 370 has aborted its first mission after six hours.
The submarine dived to a depth beyond its operating capabilities when a built in safety feature kicked in returning the Bluefin-21 back to the surface.
Weather conditions in the area since the crash have not helped the search.
Charitha Pattiaratchi is from the University of Western Australia:
“In this region there has been a big eddy, which is going round and round. So if any debris came from the plane it would have been contained around a 200 km radius, but we also had a tropical cyclone, a typhoon, very close to that area, it would have mixed up the whole area, so any debris at the surface would have been sinking.”
The American made Bluefin-21 is on a mission to plot a sonar map of the area where the Boeing 777 is thought to have gone down.
The vessel can function down to a depth of 3,500 meters, the ocean floor in the Southeren Indian Ocean is located 4,500 metres below the surface.
