The Dong Hai Jiu 101 will leave Singapore on Sunday to join the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 over a 120,000-square- kilometer (46,000-square-mile) expanse of deep seabed by late February, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said.

The ship brings the state-of-the-art Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS), which some experts say is more accurate than standard 75 kHz side-scan sonar devises that have been used to scan most of the area searched so far.

With standard acoustic sonar, the image becomes less clear the farther a seabed object is from the equipment. But with SAS, the image remains sharp regardless of an object's distance.