The first photo from the missing Titanic sub search site has emerged, showing the rescue ship Deep Energy – the latest hope in the ongoing hunt for the vessel – in the middle of the Atlantic.
Oxygen onboard the Titan has now dwindled to just 24 hours.
The sub lost communications with its operator, OceanGate Expeditions, less than two hours into its dive to the famous shipwreck on Sunday, with five people onboard.
A glimmer of hope lit up the bleak search yesterday when the Coast Guard announced a ‘banging’ sound had been detected underwater.
It remains unclear if the banging came from the submersible, but it has now become the ‘focus’ of the mission.
This image shared by the US Coast Guard is the first from the search site, some 900 miles off the coast of the US. It shows Deep Energy, a rescue ship that has deployed remote operated subs to go looking for the Titan underwater

Rescue equipment was seen arriving in St John’s, Newfoundland, on US military planes last night
The Explorers Club, of which Harding was a member and which is heavily involved in the ongoing research, said the banging provided ’cause for hope’.
‘We have much greater confidence that there is cause for hope, based on data from the field, we understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site,’ the club said yesterday.
Deep Energy’s role is to deploy remote operated subs to dive underwater and try to find the Titan.
So far, they have not yet been able to detect any sign of it or where the banging came from.
In addition to Deep Energy, eight other vessels are en route to the site that is 900 miles east of Cape Cod and around 400 miles southeast of Newfoundland.
There are multiple C-130 planes and Boeing Poseidon P-8s involved in the search too.


French explorer PH Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush are among those trapped on the submersible


Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman are also on board, along with British billionaire Hamish Harding

The Titanic wreckage is 12,500ft underwater – some 11,000ft deeper than some US and British Navy subs can dive
Despite the banging offering fresh hope, the Coast Guard is now cautioning that it may not be the missing crew.
‘You have to remember, it’s the wreck site of the Titanic. There is a lot of metal and objects in the water.
‘That’s why it’s so important that we’ve engaged experts from the Navy that understand the science behind noise and give us better information about what the source of that noise may be.
‘In the meantime, it’s a target – a focus – for us, to look at,’ Rear Adm John Mauger said on an appearance on CBS on Wednesday morning.
He added that as long as there is ‘an opportunity’ for survival, search and rescue crews will continue to look for the sub.
‘Over the course of the next 24 hours we’re bringing additional vessels and we’re going to continue to fly in the air.
‘We’re going to continue to look,’ he said.
The Coast Guard has now searched 10,000 square miles of ocean surface to no avail.
Their primary hope is to find the Titan ‘bobbing’ on the ocean surface.
In that scenario, it would likely be hoisted onto the His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Glace Bay, which is en route, and which has a decompression chamber on board.
If the Titan is stuck underwater, unable to surface, the rescue becomes more complex.
Firstly, the rescue crews will have to find it and direct a hoisting cable 2.5miles underwater.

The US Air Force is on-scene in St John’s, Newfoundland, delivering crucial search equipment

Some of the dive equipment was seen arriving in Newfoundland last night. It was then boarded on ships to be taken out to the search site
If they are able to hook a hoist or claw onto the sub, it will have to raise the vessel slowly enough to cooperate with the underwater pressure – 400 times that of sea level.
Once on the surface, the Titan can only be opened from the exterior.
There are growing questions over the safety precautions in place and manufacturing of the 21ft Titan, which some experts likened to a slap-dash can put together haphazardly with cheap parts.
Among those trapped inside it is OceanGate Expeditions CEO, Stockton Rush.
Last year, he boasted in an interview with CBS that the Titan was ‘safe’.
He claimed NASA, Boeing and The University of Washington had all signed off on the construction of the submersible, assuring its safety.
Today, NASA and The University of Washington are distancing themselves from the project.

The search is complicated by how far off-shore the Titanic wreckage sits. It is 900 miles east of Cape Cod and 400 miles southeast of Newfoundland in a remote, choppy patch of the Atlantic

A timeline of the missing sub: It lost communications with mothership Polar Prince on Sunday at 9.45am but was not reported to the Coast Guard as missing for another eight hours. It should have resurfaced at 3pm on Sunday
They said in statements to ABC News that they had been consulted, but were not involved in the building or testing of the sub.
In a heartbreaking plea this morning, one of Harding’s close friends Jannicke Mikkelsen warned ‘we are losing time’.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today program: ‘I’m nervous. I’m sick to my stomach with nerves. I’m terrified, I’m anxious. I’m not sleeping at the moment. I’m just hoping for good news. Every single second, every single minute feels like hours.’
Colonel Terry Virts, another friend who dubbed Harding ‘the quintessential British explorer’, also stressed that ‘the clock is ticking’ to find the five onboard.
Meanwhile retired British navy rear admiral Chris Parry told LBC that hopes of finding the missing deep-sea vessel without an ’emitting signal’ will be ‘impossible’ to find in the timescale.
Admiral Parry said: ‘I’m afraid the odds are vanishingly small. Obviously, we want to remain hopeful and optimistic but there are two problems here – one is actually finding the thing and secondly is how on earth are you going to get it off the seabed?

A view of the interior of the submersible with Stockton Rush, OceanGate CEO, shown right, with the remote controller it relies on for navigation
‘It’s never been done before and I don’t think anybody’s got any ideas about how to do it at the moment.’
Scientist Dr Michael Guillen, who ‘almost died’ when visiting the Titanic wreck in 2000, said that the trapped crew could be using cups to bang on the side of the sub to communicate.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: ‘If their hydrophone failed so early in the mission, less than two hours down which means they never made it to the bottom, the very least they could take their cups and bang it on the side of the sub.
‘That’s what I would do if I were down there and I am sure that’s what the pilot will be telling everybody.
‘They have five people, they can make quite a racket by just banging on the side as sound communicates extremely well in water.’
Dr Guillen added that when he heard the news it gave him ‘great hope that perhaps they’re still alive’.
Another friend of the British billionaire Chris Brown revealed he pulled out of the doomed voyage after becoming concerned about the quality of the technology and materials used in the vessel.
The 61-year-old, who is also an explorer, told BBC Breakfast of the banging sounds: ‘That is just the sort of thing I would have expected Hamish to come up with.’
‘There’s always hope. As an explorer, you never give up anyway,’ he added.
The sounds heard at 30-minute intervals could be coming from those trapped within the submarine intensely banging on the vessel’s hull so that is could be picked up by a sonar.
Sonobuoys in the ocean listen to sounds before transmitting the sonar sound energy – this most commonly referred to as a ‘ping’ that notifies the buoys at the surface.
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