OceanGate Titan sub's camera found mostly intact with SanDisk SD card still holding images and videos

[midian182]

What just happened? An incredible find has been made by teams investigating the Titan submersible's wreckage. The vessel's underwater camera has been discovered largely intact, and it contains a cheap SanDisk memory card with 12 stills and nine videos still accessible.

Over two years since the tragic incident, recovery teams are still making discoveries in the wreckage of the OceanGate Titan submersible, which imploded in the North Atlantic in June 2023.

Scott Manley, the science communication YouTuber, gamer, astrophysicist, and programmer, posted about the latest find: a hardened SubC-branded Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera containing the undamaged SD card.

The recovery teams found a hardened underwater camera in the wreckage of the Titan submersible, and inside the casing was an undamaged SD card. pic.twitter.com/QCOtdcS7dU

– Scott Manley (@DJSnM) October 15, 2025

The titanium and synthetic sapphire crystal camera is rated to withstand depths of up to 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) – the Titan imploded at around 3,300 meters (10,827 feet). The casing is intact, though the lens is shattered and the PCBs are slightly damaged.

Incredibly the SD card inside the camera was undamaged. Tom's Hardware reports that it's almost certainly a SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB, which costs around $62 on Amazon.

The camera's SD card was found to be fully encrypted, divided into a small partition for operating system updates and a larger one for user data. Due to impact damage from the accident, several components of the system-on-module (SOM) board – including connectors and the microcontroller – were broken, complicating the data extraction process.

Investigators removed the NVRAM chip, which potentially held encryption keys, and created both a direct binary copy of the SD card and surrogate SOM boards to aid in recovery.

The team, working with SubC Imaging, the Canadian Transportation Safety Board, and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), used specialized hardware to replicate the original board's functionality. After determining the data wasn't encrypted beyond the file system level, they successfully accessed the SD card contents using the manufacturer's proprietary equipment and procedures.

Ultimately, 12 still images (4,056 x 3,040) and 9 UHD videos were recovered from the camera. Unfortunately, none were from the Titan's final dive; they included underwater footage showing a diver and several clips recorded inside the Marine Institute's ROV workshop in Newfoundland. Manley writes that "the camera had been configured to dump data onto an external storage device, so nothing was found from the accident dive."

The OceanGate Titan implosion killed all five people on board instantly. The disaster was caused by a catastrophic failure of its carbon-fiber pressure hull, which could not withstand the immense deep-sea pressure of about 380 times that at the surface. Experts believe repeated dives caused material fatigue and microscopic cracks that led to the sudden collapse. The implosion occurred within milliseconds, leaving no chance of survival.

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OceanGate Titan sub's camera found mostly intact with SanDisk SD card still holding images and videos

 

[wiyosaya]

For the morbidly curious.

Don't get me wrong, I know that it could provide "important" information about the failure, but still...

 

[Megalomaniac]

The SD card data is evidence. It will be treated as such. Unless there was a camera inside the Titan, I don't think external video would be extraordinarily helpful. Internal video would be quite macabre.

I'm not a deep sea diver, but everything I do know about deep sea diving and current technology tells me that the design of the Titan was dangerous. Catastrophic failure was inevitable.

 

[DrSuess]

The SD card data is evidence. It will be treated as such. Unless there was a camera inside the Titan, I don't think external video would be extraordinarily helpful. Internal video would be quite macabre.

I'm not a deep sea diver, but everything I do know about deep sea diving and current technology tells me that the design of the Titan was dangerous. Catastrophic failure was inevitable.

If active at the time of the incident it might provide a few frames of relevant data. The camera would have kept recording until it lost power which may provide some additional data.

 

[mbrowne5061]

If active at the time of the incident it might provide a few frames of relevant data. The camera would have kept recording until it lost power which may provide some additional data.

At a standard 30FPS, it would be lucky to provide even a single frame of the implosion in-process. You'd probably need 120FPS to begin to reliably get any frame of the accident in-process, and even then, it would probably be just a few frames.

Instead, it would be much more likely to catch any moments of crew anxiety in the moments leading up to it, if the hull was being particularly noisy leading up to its failure.

But I doubt anything was actually captured, even if there were internal cameras. It sounds like the external camera system recorded directly to a remote device, so I would expect the internal cameras to do the same. Unless this device is found and it is intact, no one is ever seeing what happened on this sub on its final dive.

 

[toooooot]

The SD card data is evidence. It will be treated as such. Unless there was a camera inside the Titan, I don't think external video would be extraordinarily helpful. Internal video would be quite macabre.

I'm not a deep sea diver, but everything I do know about deep sea diving and current technology tells me that the design of the Titan was dangerous. Catastrophic failure was inevitable.

It seems quite simple to me: if the maker specified the depth where they went as safe, then they are at fault. If the sub was not designed for such depth, then the business owner is at fault.
I am not intereste in researching it, but I think finding someone who was at fault would be very easy

 

[Gixser]

RTFA: "Ultimately, 12 still images (4,056 x 3,040) and 9 UHD videos were recovered from the camera. Unfortunately, none were from the Titan's final dive"

 

[bclaymiles]

It seems quite simple to me: if the maker specified the depth where they went as safe, then they are at fault. If the sub was not designed for such depth, then the business owner is at fault.
I am not intereste in researching it, but I think finding someone who was at fault would be very easy

The maker and the business owner were one and the same. Fault was ascribed long ago. The business owner/maker paid the cost for his negligence and recklessness - unfortunately, four innocent people paid the same cost with him.

 

[Tam 212]

The maker and the business owner were one and the same. Fault was ascribed long ago. The business owner/maker paid the cost for his negligence and recklessness - unfortunately, four innocent people paid the same cost with him.

The maker and the business owner were one and the same. Fault was ascribed long ago. The business owner/maker paid the cost for his negligence and recklessness - unfortunately, four innocent people paid the same cost with him.

Yep. OceanGate was CEO Stockton Rush and Stockton Rush was Oceangate. The Coast Guard would have recommended manslaughter charges because of the degree of negligence and recklessness if he had survived.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...ering-process-for-titan-implosion/ar-AA1Oy5kF