Robot submarine finds 'Holy Grail of shipwrecks' with treasure worth $17 billion

Having aided in the search for Air France 447's wreckage back in 2011, REMUS 6000 returned to find the lost treasure of a 300-year-old Spanish galleon.

REMUS 6000 is a 13-foot-long autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designed for deep-sea operations. It can survey a large body of water using acoustic navigation and high-resolution imaging. It found San José nearly 2,000ft below the surface. The robot submarine was previously used to discover the wreckage of Air France 447 in 2011.

It is still unclear at the moment who owns the rights to the treasure. An ongoing legal dispute between the Colombian government and an American salvage company is one of the reasons for the delay in the announcement of the discovery.