An object spotted just off the beach in satellite images of the tiny Pacific island of Nikumaroro has sparked the latest bid to answer the 88-year-old Amelia Earhart mystery.

The fate of the famed American aviator – who disappeared with her  navigator Fred Noonan in July 1937 during an attempt to circumnavigate the world – has captivated the public for generations.

Despite numerous theories and expeditions, no verifiable trace of the pair or their aircraft has ever been found.

The official determination made following a US government-led search immediately after they disappeared was that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean en route to Howland Island.

Now, a team led by US archaeologist Rick Pettigrew and Purdue University is heading to the Pacific in search of the so-called Taraia Object.

US Navy veteran Mike Ashmore was scrolling through Apple Maps satellite images of Nikumaroro Island on his phone in 2020 when he spotted the unexpected object in a lagoon.

Earhart and Noonan before their crossing of the Pacific in 1937. Photo: Getty

Ashmore thought he saw an object resembling an aircraft wing and shared the picture with a popular Amelia Earhart online forum hosted by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.

The object caught the attention of Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, who found that the anomaly – since been named the Taraia Object – is visible in aerial photos of the lagoon dating back 1938.

The team was scheduled to set sail from Majuro in the Marshall Islands to Nikumaroro on November 4, but this week announced the mission was postponed until next year as they gather more required permits.

When they eventually get to Nikumaroro, the researchers plan to spend around five days on the island investigating the object in the lagoon.

If indeed the object turns out to be plane wreckage linked to Earhart’s Lockheed 10E Electra, it would be a landmark discovery and point to Earhart dying as a castaway on Nikumaroro.

The Earhart mystery has never been far from the public imagination and President Donald Trump spurred renewed interest in September when he ordered the release of records about Earhart and her final trip.

While the upcoming expedition to Nikumaroro has Earnhart devotees excited, there are several competing theories as to the fate of the aviators.

Japanese captives

The Japanese capture theory is that Japanese forces captured Earhart and Noonan after they navigated to the Japanese South Seas Mandate.

A number of Earhart’s relatives have been convinced the Japanese were somehow involved in her disappearance, citing unnamed witnesses including Japanese troops and Saipan natives.

Rabaul theory

Also known as the New Britain theory, this assumes that Earhart turned back mid-flight and tried to reach the airfield at Rabaul, New Britain, northeast of mainland Papua New Guinea.

In 1990, Donald Angwin, a veteran of the Australian Army’s World War II New Britain campaign, reported that, in 1945, he had seen a wrecked aircraft in the jungle that may have been Earhart’s Electra.

Searches of the area failed to find any wreckage.

Nikumaroro bones

Richard Jantz, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, in 2018 claimed he was “99 per cent” convinced that bones found on Nikumaroro in 1940 belonged to Earnhart.

Publishing his findings in the journal Forensic Anthropology, Jantz contradicted an earlier determination that they came from a man.

Now lost, all that remains of the bones are even measurements from the skull, and the bones of the arm and leg.

The findings have been disputed and are unable to be proven.

Some people assert Earhart (left) survived and took on a new identity. Photo: Wikimedia

A 2006 National Geographic Channel episode of the Undiscovered History series reignited a theory that Earhart survived her flight, changed her name, remarried and became US banker Irene Craigmile Bolam.

The claim was originally published in the 1970 book Amelia Earhart Lives, which was withdrawn from shelves after Bolam filed a lawsuit.