After four days, the oxygen timeline for the missing Titanic research submersible has passed a critical point.
The Titan—a 21-foot vessel—along with its five-person crew, disappeared on June 18 just over an hour into their dive in the Atlantic Ocean.
According to NBC News, Coast Guard officials previously estimated Titan's 96-hour oxygen supply "could run out of air" just before 7:10 a.m. ET June 22. However, exact levels—or potential efforts made from passengers onboard to preserve oxygen—cannot be confirmed.
At the time of its disappearance, the submersible was on a mission to view the wreckage of the RMS Titanic—which sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1912—as part of an OceanGate Expeditions tour.
After Titan's disappearance over the weekend, the Coast Guard launched a massive search-and-rescue mission to find the submersible and its passengers, including British billionaire Hamish Harding, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as well as Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood.
(A representative for French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet told the New York Times that he's a passenger on the Titan. However, NBC News has not been able to confirm that Nargeolet is in fact onboard the submersible at this time.)
"Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families," OceanGate said in a June 19 statement, "we are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible."
On June 21, the U.S. Coast Guard offered a glimmer of hope when it shared that a Canadian P-3 aircraft had detected underwater noises in the search area.
"As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises," the Official First Coast Guard District Twitter account added. "Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue."
To learn more about the five-person crew onboard the Titan, keep reading...