Timeline of United States discoveries four days into the ship's maiden voyage, "Titanic" struck an iceberg and sank two hours and forty minutes later, early on April 15, 1912. The sinking resulted in the deaths of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. After nearly 74 years of being lost at sea on the bottom of the ocean floor, a joint Franco-American expedition led by American oceanographer Dr. Robert D. Ballard, discovered the wreckage of the RMS "Titanic" two miles (3 km) beneath the waves of the North Atlantic on September 1, 1985. Ballard
Wreck of the RMS Titanic – for the Navy. The Navy commissioned Ballard and his team to carry out a month-long expedition every year for four years, to keep "Argo / Jason" in good working condition. It agreed to Ballard's proposal to use some of the time to search for "Titanic" once the Navy's objectives had been met; the search would provide an ideal opportunity to test "Argo / Jason". In 1984 the Navy sent Ballard and "Argo" to map the wrecks of the sunken nuclear submarines USS "Thresher" and USS "Scorpion", lost in the North Atlantic at depths of up to . The expedition