Seventy-five years after famous aviator Amelia Earhart, her navigator and her plane disappeared, researchers are setting out on a $2 million expedition to find the assumed wreckage.

Researchers hope a robotic underwater vehicle mounted with multibeam sonar cameras to collect images from the ocean floor will help them find Earhart's plane.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery believes Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, landed on Nikumaroro Island in the western Pacific.

"It will help bring closure to the whole Amelia Earhart story," said Richard Gillespie, of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. "And if, in fact, there is a final chapter to Earhart's life, a chapter that involved being a castaway struggling to survive on an uninhabited, waterless atoll where she succeeded for a time before eventually dying, that needs to be known."

Earhart was trying to fly around the world when she vanished in 1937.