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"  After a first failed try to find wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, search crews sent the Bluefin-21 robot back into the depths early Wednesday morning (Australia time) for what they hoped would be a full 24-hour deployment. The first mission was aborted after eight hours on Tuesday when the probe was sent beyond its maximum range of 15,000 feet below the surface, at which point the vehicle essentially shut down, according to investigators in Perth, the headquarters for the search effort. The glitches provide a glimpse of what awaits the rescue effort as it moves to the next and far more daunting phase: searching conducted solely by autonomous underwater vehicles, using sidescan sonar, and in ocean depths that have never been charted before. The fading pings from what are presumed to be the plane&amp;#039;s black box recorders had narrowed the search area to about the size of Los Angeles. But given the slow pace at which deep-sea vehicles move, it could take many weeks, if not months, to scour the entire zone. The declaration that the pings have effectively gone silent, presumably because the batteries (guaranteed to work only 30 days) finally expired, didn&amp;#039;t sit well with some aviation safety experts. According to one source, the move seemed premature, since weather and currents affect the ability of the tow pinger locator to pick up signals. And NTSB experts had earlier expressed optimism that the pings might live on for several months. Nevertheless, the decision was made to both shut down the effort to &amp;quot;reacquire&amp;quot; the pings and to put a halt to the aerial search for debris and other floating evidence by the end of this week. At a news briefing, Angus Houston, the former Australian naval official leading the joint effort, described some of the challenges facing the team going forward. &amp;quot;I must stress that it (the Bluefin 21) is at the limit of its capability as soon as it gets to 4.5 km (roughly 3 miles)... and, when the vehicle goes down, you don&amp;#039;t get any indication of how things are going while it&amp;#039;s deployed. You have to wait and recover it before you can download the data that has been picked up. I would caution everyone against raising hopes that the deployment of the AUV will result in the detection of the wreckage. It may not.&amp;quot; Houston also said that separately, the Australian ship Ocean Shield had spotted an oil slick a few miles from where the pinger locator had been operating. The ship collected a sample, which investigators will analyze to see if it contains Jet A fuel used by commercial airliners, or perhaps some other substance such as hydraulic fluid.  Officials from San Diego based Metron, which worked on the nearly two-year recovery of Air France 447, said that the search would go much faster if more vehicles could be sent to the scene. Colleen Keller, a senior analyst who worked on that previous search, said that there are other vehicles in use around the world that could aid in the search, such as the Remora 6000, but it might take several weeks to speed them to the area. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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