Can an Unmanned Mini Yellow Submarine Find Missing Flight 370?
The undersea search could take two months. Or longer.
For now, the best hopes for finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ride on a mini yellow submarine named Artemis, after the Greek goddess of hunting.
The 21-foot (6.4-meter) unmanned submersible is scouring the remote depths of the southern Indian Ocean, nearly 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) beneath the surface. (Related: "Searching for the Missing Malaysian Jet at the Ends of the Earth.")
The work is painstakingly slow. Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott cautioned last weekend that scouring the latest search zone of 18,000 square miles (46,600 square kilometers) could take six to eight weeks. That may have been optimistic.
As if to underscore the point, Artemis's very first dive was aborted 6 hours into a 16-hour seafloor cruise on Monday when the sub
