Australian officials say a robotic mini-submarine searching for the missing Malaysian airliner deep in the southern Indian Ocean has completed its mission in the third attempt.
Two previous missions off Western Australia were cut short because of technical difficulties.
The deep sea mini-sub is being deployed from Australian defence ship the Ocean Shield. Photo: AFP / US Navy
According to the search coordination centre in Perth, data from the submarine's latest mission hasn't yet indicated anything significant, the BBC reports.
Flight MH370 vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board on 8 March. Officials do not know why the plane flew so far off course and an investigation is continuing.
The deep sea sub Bluefin-21 is designed to create a sonar map of the ocean floor and was deployed after sensitive listening equipment failed to establish contact with several underwater acoustic pulses that were consistent with an aircraft's black box flight recorders.
Finding the Boeing 777's flight recorders are seen as key to understanding what happened.
The submersible has an operating depth of 4500 metres (15,000ft) and on its first mission a built-in safety device returned it to the surface after it exceeded that depth.
Its second mission was also cut short because of unspecified technical difficulties, but the third mission - a full 16 hours, plus two hours each way for diving and surfacing - went according to plan.
