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Large portions of Titan are being retrieved from the seafloor in record time. These and smaller bits of Titan and even the remains of the 5 crew, may reveal why Titan failed.
In particular I was
hoping that battery management failure causing fire might be discernable due to burn marks on Titan parts and sadly on human
material.
But as this video here (from 2:05 to 3:15) illustrates the beginning of compression of air (similar to a diesel piston) can cause sparking, fire and explosion in just a few milliseconds. At almost the same instant implosion of a submersible is proceeding. A few milliseconds later another explosion “pushes out” the implosion, scattering a submersible’s bits over a relatively wide area.
As well as diesels there are also some parallels in a thermonuclear bomb of near simultaneous implosion causing explosion happening even faster than in Titan 4,000 meters down.
All this complicates
the job of examiners studying a Titan fire line of enquiry.
However, if enough battery material can be recovered, a study of its eventual chemical state might reveal whether fire was caused by:
- a runaway battery heat buildup and/or
- a spark igniting battery gas or
- igniting Titan's oxygen rich environment
all preceding Titan hitting the seafloor and then almost instant implosion. This implosion-then-explosion was presumably the one event heard by the US IUSS.
The carbon fiber (for all its possible technical pressure hull failure faults) might also reveal discernable prior melting that was different from implosion flash.