Devastating news for the loved ones of the passengers aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 that's been missing since March 8.

The Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC), the Australian agency coordinating the multinational search for the missing plane, today concluded that MH370 is not within the area combed extensively by an unmanned submersible for the past two months.

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MH370 carrying 239 people vanished on the evening of March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

"The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and, in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370," JACC said.

The setback means that searchers are going back to square one to again analyze seven "handshake" signals that were sent by the plane to an Inmarsat satellite.

JACC said the U.S. Navy's Bluefin 21 submersible completed its final underwater mission in the southern Indian Ocean Wednesday after scanning 330 square miles.

The Royal Australian Navy and naval vessels from several other countries have been on a fruitless search covering a 485 square kilometer area of the ocean floor at depths of over 4,000 meters to try to locate the plane's wreckage.

JACC concluded that the "pings" first detected on April 7 that led it to search the area had, in fact, come from search equipment on a ship scouring the area and not from the aircraft's black boxes. Not a single piece of wreckage from the missing jet has been found in the search area.

JACC said it plans to expand a new search area to 21,600 square miles and could begin the search in August. In the meantime, JACC will send out a tender next week for vessels and sonar equipment to continue the search for the airliner.

JACC plans to use much more powerful commercial side-scan sonars in the new search that could last from eight months to a year.

US Navy deputy director of ocean engineering Michael Dean had earlier said the pings came from another man-made source unrelated to MH370.

"Our best theory at this point is that (the pings were) likely some sound produced by the ship ... or within the electronics of the Towed Pinger Locator," Dean said.

Tagsmh370, search, Malaysian Airlines, missing