Wreck of the RMS Titanic D. Michael Harris and Jack Grimm had failed to find "Titanic" but their expeditions did succeed in producing fairly detailed mapping of the area in which the ship had sunk. It was clear that the position given in "Titanic"s distress signals was inaccurate, which was a major expedition difficulty because it increased the search area's already-expansive size. Despite the failure of his 1977 expedition, Robert Ballard had not given up hope and devised new technologies and a new search strategy to tackle the problem. The new technology was a system called "Argo / Jason". This consisted of a remotely controlled
Wreck of the RMS Titanic "Titanic". As Harris/Grimm's unsuccessful efforts had taken more than forty days, Ballard decided that extra help would be needed. He approached the French national oceanographic agency, IFREMER, with which Woods Hole had previously collaborated. The agency had recently developed a high-resolution side-scan sonar called SAR and agreed to send a research vessel, "Le Suroît", to survey the sea bed in the area where "Titanic" was believed to lie. The idea was for the French to use the sonar to find likely targets, and then for the Americans to use "Argo" to check out the targets and hopefully confirm whether they