A Texas-based marine robotics company embarked on an intermittent 55-day mission Tuesday to try and locate the elusive wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished with 239 people on board in 2014.<\/p>\n
Ocean Infinity<\/a>, a marine robotics company based in Austin, Texas, struck the coveted deal<\/a> with the Malaysian government, the country\u2019s Ministry of Transport announced in early December.<\/p>\n The company will employ its own underwater vehicles, deep sea drones and advanced scanning technology on the mission, but only for the 55-days that the Malaysian government permitted. <\/p>\n A US marine robotics company launched a 55-day mission to find the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 wreckage on Tuesday. REUTERS<\/p>\n The remote-operated machinery will scan 6,000-square-miles down in the Indian Ocean seabed.<\/p>\n The Malaysia Airlines plane, a Boeing 777, disappeared from air traffic radar on March 8, 2014 shortly after departing from Malaysia\u2019s capital, Kuala Lumpur. The 239 passengers and crew were set to arrive in Beijing that same day.<\/p>\n Two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese. There were also Malaysians, Americans, Australians and other nationalities on board.<\/p>\n The confounding disappearance<\/a> of the entire plane rocked the world<\/a> and remains one of the single-largest unsolved mysteries to date.<\/p>\n No bodies or wreckage were ever found, and the pilots didn\u2019t issue a distress call. The plane\u2019s location-tracking transponder stopped broadcasting entirely shortly after departing from Kuala Lumpur. <\/p>\n Authorities surmised the plane crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. EPA<\/p>\n The 239 people on board are all presumed dead. AP<\/p>\n Satellite data showed the plane turned from its flight path and headed south toward the Indian Ocean, where officials believed it had crashed<\/a>.<\/p>\n The immediate search for the plane was called off after just 22 days because of bad weather. It never resumed, and everyone aboard the plane was presumed dead.<\/p>\n