The Coast Guard has recovered remaining debris, including presumed human remains, from a submersible that imploded on its way to explore the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five onboard, deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean’s surface, officials said Tuesday.
The Coast Guard said that the recovery and transfer of remaining parts was completed last Wednesday, and a photo showed the intact aft titanium endcap of the 22-foot (6.7-meter) vessel. Additional presumed human remains were carefully recovered from within Titan’s debris and transported for analysis by U.S. medical professionals, the Coast Guard said.
The salvage mission conducted under an agreement with the U.S. Navy was a follow-up to initial recovery operations on the ocean floor roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) away from the Titanic, the Coast Guard said.
In some cases that’s exactly what happens. This was a known scenario and the failure was predictable.
It would have been different if they followed all industry standards and the sub still failed - that would produce valuable data that could contribute to making our understanding of the science, as well as prevailing industry standards, better.
In cases like this you can gather all the remains and data you want, and analyse it, but only if you want to confirm what we already know - reproducing observations and confirming hypothesis is an important part of science, but everything costs money, and at some point you need to triage the studies you want to put money into.
They can still learn something from the materials by looking at how it failed (mostly because the frequency of tests of larger objects at these pressures is limited), but there’s not likely going to be anything surprising, just another data point to help calibrate some material science formulas