Satellite Images May Show Earhart's Plane
Dive Team Plans 2002 Trip To Pacific Atoll
A Delaware-based archaeological group will send a diving team next year to an atoll 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii to look for whatever produced the rust-colored spots that showed up in pictures (pictured, left) taken by Space Imaging of Thornton.
"Nothing out there occurs naturally that's rust colored," said Rick Gillespie of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. He believes that the spot beyond the reef around the uninhabited atoll of Nikumaroro could be an engine and the landing gear of Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Special Electra.
Circumstantial evidence has suggested Nikumaroro atoll was the place from which Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan sent their last, faint radio messages.
The two disappeared during a 1937 attempt to circle the globe.
The pictures of the atoll were snapped for Gillespie's group by a Space Imaging satellite that is orbiting 423 miles above the Earth.
Using a giant telephoto lens, the satellite can focus on objects as small as one square meter and detect objects up to 90 feet below the surface of the water.
Gillespie said that the photos are the best evidence so far that Nikumaroro atoll was where Earhart's life ended.
Low on fuel, Earhart and Noonan are believed to have landed on the atoll. The craft eventually was pulled from the beach by a stormy sea, Gillespie believes.
At that point, Earhart and Noonan "were quite literally marooned on a desert island," Gillespie said.
In 1940, a Fiji naval officer, Stanley Brown, found human bones on Nikumaroro. A British physician concluded the bones belonged to a man of European or mixed-race origin, but other experts said that the evidence suggests the skeleton was that of a white female of northern European background.
Also found was a campfire, a box designed to hold a sextant and the heel of a woman's shoe, said Gillespie, who studied records in a British archive.
Gillespie and a team that includes divers will leave next April for Pongo Pongo, where they will rent a boat for the three-day journey to the atoll.
Space Imaging is the company that took widely used satellite photos of the Navy plane that was forced to make an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island last April.
