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An expedition to find out what happened to celebrated US woman pilot Amelia Earhart is setting out from Hawaii on Monday, 75 years to the day since she took off on her last flight.
Researchers will dive around the uninhabited Pacific island of Nikumaroro looking for clues.
Their theory is that Earhart crashed there in 1937, surviving for days.
Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, a feat she performed in 1932.
On 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart and and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Papua New Guinea in their Electra 10E aircraft, en route to Howland Island.
Many experts think a navigational error caused the pair to run out of fuel over the sea. They were never seen again.
They were three-quarters of the way through an unprecedented circumnavigation of the globe around the Equator.
The expedition, which is costing more than $2m (£1.3m), is being led by Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar).
He has spent almost a quarter of a century advancing an alternative hypothesis, correspondents say.
He believes Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on the uninhabited Pacific island of Nikumaroro, where they survived for a time before finally succumbing to hunger, thirst or injury.
Over the next three weeks, Mr Gillespie and his team will deploy robots equipped with sonar and high-definition video cameras to search the waters off the island for clues.
"What we're hoping for is to come back with good imagery, photographs, of wreckage that's conclusively, unquestionably pieces, at least, of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft; that's the goal," he told the BBC.
Tighar has mounted several expeditions to the island in recent year - finding bones on Nikumaroro during an earlier search, but lab tests were inconclusive on whether they were human bones.
Many historians argue there is only circumstantial evidence to support the Nikumaroro island theory.
This is Tighar's 10th expedition to Nikumaroro.
"We have continued the investigation because we have been successful in finding evidence that supports the hypothesis we are testing," Mr Gillespie told the BBC.
If identifiable wreckage is found, Tighar will return with the equipment needed to recover and conserve it, he says.
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