Satellite calls yield no clues to missing Argentine submarine

ARGENTINA: A storm yesterday complicated efforts to find an Argentine navy submarine missing in the South Atlantic with 44 crew members, while satellite calls thought to come from the vessel did not help searchers identify the vessel’s location.

The defence ministry has said the ARA San Juan appeared to try to make contact through seven failed satellite calls on Sunday. The vessel was 432km off Argentina’s coast when its location was last known on Thursday.

As waves of up to 8m and winds reaching 40 knots complicated the search by sea, authorities spent yesterday trying to trace the submarine’s location through data from the satellite calls without significant progress, a navy official told reporters.

‘‘We analysed these signals, which as we know were intermittent and weak,’’ said Gabriel Galeazzi, a naval commander. ‘‘They could not help determine a point on the map to help the search.’’

US satellite communications company Iridium Communications Inc, which was brought in to help analyse the calls, said they did not originate with its device aboard the vessel and may have been from another satellite communications company’s equipment.

It said the last call it detected from its device was on Thursday, the same day the government said the vessel vanished.

More than a dozen boats and aircraft from Argentina, the United States, Britain, Chile and Brazil had joined the effort. Authorities have mainly been scanning the sea from above as the storm made the search difficult for boats, navy Admiral Gabriel Gonzalez told reporters.

‘‘Unfortunately these conditions are expected to remain for the next 48 hours,’’ Gonzalez said from the Mar del Plata naval base, about 420km south of Buenos Aires where the submarine had been heading toward before vanishing.

A search of 80 per cent of the area initially targeted for the operation turned up no sign of the submarine on the ocean’s surface, but the crew should have ample supplies of food and oxygen, Balbi said.

The navy said an electrical outage on the diesel-electricpropelled vessel might have downed its communications. Protocol calls for submarines to surface if communication is lost.

Three boats left Mar del Plata on Sunday with radar detection probes and were following the path that the submarine would have taken to arrive at the base in reverse, Balbi said.

‘‘Those probes allow the boats to sweep the ocean floor during their journey and try to make a record of the floor in three dimensions,’’ Balbi said.

The US Navy said its four aircraft were carrying a submarine rescue chamber designed during World War II that can reach a bottomed submarine at depths of 260m and rescue up to six people at a time. The chamber can seal over the submarine’s hatch to allow sailors to move between the vessels. It said it also brought a remote-controlled vehicle that can be submerged and controlled from the surface

The dramatic search has captivated the nation of 44 million.

- Reuters

"We analysed these signals ... They could not help determine a point on themap to help the search."

Gabriel Galeazzi, naval commander.