SD Card Recovered From Camera That Was Onboard OceanGate Titan Sub
A camera was found and recovered among the wreckage of the OceanGate Titan disaster — with the SD card still intact.
This week, an official report into the disaster concluded that the Titan submersible imploded in June 2023 while on its way to visit the wreck of the Titanic because of poor engineering and a failure to properly test the vessel. Five people lost their lives.
And according to an X post by Scott Manley, a science YouTuber, a hardened underwater camera was discovered among the wreckage of the Titan sub on the bottom of the ocean floor. Inside the casing was an undamaged SD card; the camera itself was badly damaged.
Manley shared official documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, which contain photos of the underwater camera and SD card. However, part of the images are bizarrely redacted at the manufacturer’s request.
But it isn’t exactly difficult to figure out which memory card company made the SD card. It is quite clearly a SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB. Elizabeth Greene compares it to redacting a Coke bottle.
It’s not clear why the redacting request was made, but the camera manufacturer, SubC, also made one on the photos, which show the circuit board of the camera, perhaps to protect trade secrets. The camera is a SubC Rayfin Mk2 Benthic camera, which is designed for Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) to dive more than 6,000 meters. For reference, the wreck of the Titanic rests at 3,800 meters.
Are There Photos of the Titan Implosion?
Instead of using the recovered SD card, officials made an “exact binary image of the SD card,” essentially a bit-for-bit copy of the card’s entire contents. After a lot of memory card jargonese, the team recovered 12 still photos and nine videos from the copied SD card.
The report reveals that — despite having the SD card installed — the camera was set up to save files onto the submersible’s onboard computer. There is no mention of what happened to the onboard computer, but it presumably perished in the accident.
“Unfortunately, the camera had been configured to dump data onto an external storage device, so nothing was found from the accident dive,” Manley adds.
All of the photos found on the SD card were taken at the port. The report says that those photos were either tests or mistakes before the camera was reconfigured to save its data on an external device.
“It is likely that the camera was being configured to store its data to the onboard computer on May 16th, with one image being stored accidentally to the camera’s SD Card and then configured properly to store data to the computer on board the submersible,” the report says.
“No data with a timestamp after May 16th was found on the camera, so it is likely that none of the data recorded on the SD Card were of the accident voyage or dive.”
