So, what comes next in the salvage mission?

I spoke with University of Sydney Professor Stefan Williams at the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering just now about what investigators will be looking for as they try to piece together the catastrophic failure of the submersible.

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Professor Williams said authorities will conduct a visual inspection of the debris and the Titan’s pressure vessel, which he expects will have a big hole in some part of it.

“When that pressure vessel failed, it would have been like a small bomb going off,” he said.

“To really understand what’s happened, they probably need to recover some of the submersible, but you can imagine trying to lift a minivan off the seafloor from four kilometres is not going to be terribly easy.”

At least five major components or pieces of the Titan have been identified by robots so far, like the front of the sub and the rear tail comb, all of which investigators will hope to examine.

Professor Williams said he had seen a pressure vessel undergo destruction testing, in which they are housed in a chamber of water or oil and placed under extreme pressure akin to that under the sea.

“The thing doesn’t just scrunch up into a little ball, you tend to have an enormous hole in some part of the end cap or the body,” he said.

He added that extracting parts of the submersible off the sea floor, almost four kilometres below sea level would be possible, but would come at an immense cost.

“Some of those vessels that are attending to the site will be $50,000 a day to run. So, how you finance that, and then there’s seven or eight of those vessels around. You can imagine the resources that are being brought to bear on this.”