WASHINGTON -- The wreckage of Amelia Earhart's ditched-at-sea aircraft may have been found. High-resolution satellite imagery of Nikumaroro Island in the southwest Pacific has detected what may be remains of the plane resting in water within a coral atoll.

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, disappeared in 1937 during an attempt to fly around the world. The disappearance of the flyers set off a massive sea and air search, personally ordered by then U.S. President Roosevelt.

Despite a tremendous search effort, no physical evidence of the aviators nor their plane was ever found.

Most researchers contend that the airplane, depleted of fuel and off course, crashed in the sea. Both Earhart and Noonan were assumed to have perished in ocean waters.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) in Wilmington, Delaware, is mounting an expedition next month to help solve the 64-year old mystery and find Earhart's plane. This time, the team is armed with imagery taken by Space Imaging's Ikonos 2 satellite.

TIGHAR's 12-year investigation, dubbed The Earhart Project, offers compelling new evidence which suggests that the ill-fated flight reached Nikumaroro, formerly Gardner Island. This uninhabited coral atoll is in the Phoenix Group, now part of the Republic of Kiribati. Islands of Kiribati are low-lying coral atolls built on a submerged volcanic chain and encircled by reefs.

Five earlier expeditions to the remote island have recovered artifacts, suspected of being from the lost flight. The upcoming sixth trek is set to depart Los Angeles on August 24, returning on September 24, said Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR's executive director.

"There does appear to be an object on the edge of the reef, off the western end of the island. It's in a particularly suspicious location," Gillespie told SPACE.com. There is a rust-colored tint in satellite imagery pixels at nearly the spot where fishermen visiting that area long ago reported seeing a wrecked airplane, he said.

"What we've got now is imagery that supports an anecdote. And that's the pattern that, in the past, had led to the discovery of things," Gillespie said. "I'll have divers in the water by early September in that location and we'll see what's there."

Lockheed Martin's Ikonos 2 looked down on the Pacific island on April 16, simultaneously snapping black and white imagery at 3.3 feet (one meter) resolution and color imagery with 13 feet (four meter) resolution.

"Everything just clicked," Gillespie said. "We got lucky is what it amounted to. We got a beautiful day with minimal cloud cover and a perfect lookdown angle. The imagery just knocks your socks off."

In a technological twist of fate, aviation history has matched up with space technology.