Some 34 scientific team members, crew and filmmakers will leave Honolulu next week on the University of Hawaii vessel Kaimikai-o-Kanaloa to try to get to the bottom of one of the most intriguing aviation mysteries of our time: What happened to Amelia Earhart when she disappeared on her round-the-world flight in 1937?

Ric Gillespie believes the answer may lie in deep water on the west end of remote Nikumaroro island in the Republic of Kiribati.

He believes that Earhart, running low on fuel, safely landed her Lockheed Electra on the isle’s coral lagoon. The aircraft eventually was pulled into the sea, he says, and the famed aviatrix and her navigator, Fred Noonan, lived and died as castaways on Nikumaroro waiting for a rescue that never came.

"We feel that we have very good evidence that her airplane went over the edge of the reef at Nikumaroro sometime around July 6 (1937), four or five days after she disappeared," said Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.

The Delaware group is mounting its biggest investigation yet as it prepares to return to Nikumaroro, a 3.7-mile-long atoll it has visited multiple times since 1989.

TIGHAR, which is leaving Honolulu on July 2 — the 75th anniversary of Earhart’s disappearance — said it is spending $2.3 million to charter the Kaimikai-o-Kanaloa, map the ocean floor off Nikumaroro, search with a high-frequency side-scan sonar robot, and take black-and-white photos as deep as 4,921 feet with a remotely operated vehicle.

John Smith, science director for UH’s Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, will go with the TIGHAR team to assist in the undersea mapping, said John Wiltshire, director of the UH undersea research lab.

"I’ve looked over (TIGHAR’s work) — it’s very exciting," Wiltshire said. "They’ve done a lot of research and they have a very good story to go with the research they have. So I think if anybody has a reasonable chance of finding the plane, it’s them."

Other theories hold that Earhart simply ran out of gas and crashed into the sea on the leg from New Guinea to her intended destination, Howland Island.

TIGHAR’s version of events got a boost with news that a 1937 photo taken at Nikumaroro just months after Earhart disappeared showed, with analysis, what the organization said looks like the landing gear of a Lockheed Electra sticking out of the lagoon.

Photo analysts with the U.S. State Department agreed that the object is consistent with one of the main landing gear assemblies of the famed Model 10E Special, TIGHAR said on its website.

"The photograph is not a smoking gun — at least not yet," the group said. "But it is new and compelling support for TIGHAR’s long-standing hypothesis that Earhart landed the twin-engine Electra safely on the island’s dry, smooth reef and sent radio distress calls for several days before rising tides and surf washed the aircraft into the ocean where it broke up and sank."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, flanked by Gillespie and oceanographer Robert Ballard, noted TIGHAR’s efforts to find Earhart at a March 20 news conference in Washington, D.C.

TIGHAR’s theory is that Earhart and Noonan were unable to make visual or radio contact with Howland Island, and, flying on a course of 157 degrees, found Nikumaroro, then called Gardner Island, 300 miles southeast of their target.

British government records confirmed the discovery in 1940 of the partial skeleton (later lost) of a castaway who died prior to the island’s settlement in 1939, according to TIGHAR. With the bones were found a sextant box.

The heel of a woman’s shoe and pieces of a cosmetic jar resembling Dr. C.H. Berry’s Freckle Ointment, which Earhart used, also were found.

Gillespie said TIGHAR chartered an old 110-foot ship out of Honolulu to do a sonar search in 1991.

"They go all the way around the island, and the last part they are going to do is off the west end, and bang! They fly the sonar fish into an underwater obstruction, probably a small sea mount or something, and we lose the fish. … So the one part of the island we didn’t get to survey is of course where it now looks like the wreckage probably is," Gillespie said.

His group contracted for the use of the 223-foot Kaimikai-o-Kanaloa, the support vessel for the Hawaii Undersea Research lab’s submersibles, because "we needed a ship and they needed somebody to charter a ship," he said. "They are (experiencing) cutbacks at the University of Hawaii."

The expedition, with 17 in the scientific party, 14 crew members and a Discovery Channel film crew, will leave Honolulu on July 2. It will take the "K-O-K" ship eight days to cover the 2,071 miles to Nikumaroro. TIGHAR expects to be at the island for 10 days. With the eight-day return, the expedition is anticipated to last a total of 26 days.

Driving it all is an unabated interest in the disappearance of a pioneering aviatrix whose femininity was as appealing as her adventurousness was inspiring.

Clinton said in March that Earhart was an unlikely heroine for a nation down on its luck during the Great Depression when she set out to be the first pilot, man or woman, to fly around the world along the longest equatorial route.

But she "embodied the spirit of an America coming of age and increasingly confident, ready to lead in a quite uncertain and dangerous world," Clinton said. Eleanor Roosevelt had hoped that Earhart could teach her to fly.

Earhart crashed her Lockheed Electra on Ford Island’s Luke Field in March 1937 in her first attempt to fly around the world. She never made it back to Hawaii on her second try.

"We’ve talked about why she still matters," Gillespie said, "and it’s because she mattered to people when she was alive, mattered in the sense that what she did was inspiring and the example that she set changed peoples’ lives."