Enlarge / OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush shows David Pogue the 2010-era game controller that pilots the Titan sub during a CBS Sunday Morning segment broadcast in November 2022. (credit: CBS Sunday Morning)

On Sunday, news broke about an OceanGate Expeditions tourist submarine headed for the wreck of the Titanic that went missing with five people aboard. Soon after, details emerged about the sub's non-standard design that did not meet regulations, including steering apparently handled by a $30 Logitech F710 wireless PC game controller from 2010.

Reuters reports that the five-person crew of the missing vessel, known as Titan , includes Hamish Harding, a British billionaire and adventure enthusiast, and OceanGate's founder and CEO, Stockton Rush. It disappeared on Sunday while on an expedition to explore the Titanic shipwreck site after losing contact with the Polar Prince research ship, roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes after their dive began.

The submarine was last reported in the North Atlantic, approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in a water body known to have a depth of about 13,000 feet. Search and rescue operations began shortly thereafter and are still underway. According to the BBC, the entire sub is bolted shut from the outside, so even if the vessel surfaces, the occupants cannot escape without outside assistance and could suffocate within the capsule.

The RMS Titanic sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic in 1912, but the fate of the ship and its passengers has fascinated the popular imagination for more than a century. Now we have the first full-size 3D digital scan of the complete wreckage—a "digital twin" that captures Titanic in unprecedented detail. Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company , and Atlantic Productions (which is making a documentary about the project) conducted the scans over a six-week expedition last summer.

“Great explorers have been down to the Titanic ... but actually they went with really low-resolution cameras and they could only speculate on what happened," Atlantic Productions CEO Andrew Geffen told BBC News . “We now have every rivet of the Titanic , every detail, we can put it back together, so for the first time we can actually see what happened and use real science to find out what happened."

Titanic met its doom just four days into the Atlantic crossing, roughly 375 miles (600 kilometers) south of Newfoundland. At 11:40 pm ship's time on April 14, 1912, Titanic hit that infamous iceberg and began taking on water, flooding five of its 16 watertight compartments, thereby sealing its fate. More than 1,500 passengers and crew perished; only around 710 of those on board survived.

Enlarge / Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) sacrifices his spot on a makeshift raft to save Rose (Kate Winslet) in Titanic . (credit: CBS/Getty Images)

(Major spoilers for the 1997 film below. Psst: The ship sinks.)

Ever since James Cameron's blockbuster film Titanic hit movie screens in December 1997, fans have been arguing about a specific scene in which Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) nobly gives up a spot on a makeshift raft to ensure Rose (Kate Winslet), the woman he loves, survives. Tired of constantly having to defend his artistic choice against claims that both lovers could have fit onto the raft, Cameron decided to re-create the scenario under controlled conditions in a new documentary for National Geographic: Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, marking the film's quarter-century anniversary.

For the 10 people on the planet who haven't seen the film, Jack and Rose are star-crossed lovers from different social strata who have the misfortune of consummating their love minutes before Titanic hits that infamous iceberg. (The characters are fictional, intended to humanize the tragedy by giving us someone specific to root for.) Much drama ensues, involving Rose rescuing Jack from a lower deck as the icy waters approach and engulf them and jumping off the lifeboat she briefly boarded because she can't imagine leaving Jack behind.

Enlarge / Multibeam sonar image of the SS Mesaba shipwreck lying on the sea bed in the Irish Sea. (credit: Bangor University)

Before the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in April 1912, the ship's wireless operators received multiple warning messages of icebergs, growlers, and field ice from six other ships in the region. Now, researchers at Bangor University have identified the wreck of one of those ships in the Irish Sea: the SS Mesaba , which sank in 1918 after being torpedoed by a German submarine. It's one of 273 ships mapped and mostly identified in that 7,500-square-mile region, using a state-of-the-art technique called multibeam sonar .

As we've reported previously , Titanic set out on her maiden voyage to much fanfare on April 10, 1912. Among other amenities, there was a shiny new wireless telegraph system on board, courtesy of the Marconi International Marine Communication Company, capable of transmitting radio signals over a radius of 350 miles (563 kilometers). Although its purpose was mostly to send so-called "marconigrams" for the ship's wealthiest first-class passengers, operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride also handled any messages from other ships—notably weather reports and ice warnings.

Phillips and Bride had been receiving ice warnings from other ships all day on April 14, beginning at 9 am with reports of "bergs and growlers and field ice" from RMS Caronia . Later that day, RMS Baltic warned that a Greek ship had reported "passing icebergs and large quantities of field ice." Captain Edward Smith acknowledged receipt of both messages and shifted course a bit further south in response, but he didn't reduce the ship's speed.