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PURDUE-LED EARHART EXPEDITION SET TO GO: ‘A LOT OF EYES ARE ON US’
As they prepared to leave later this week for a remote spot in the Pacific to check evidence purported to be the missing plane aviator Amelia Earhart was attempting to fly around the world in 1937, four of the expedition’s 16 crew members – including several with ties to Purdue – gave an update this week on planning.
The goal: To uncover whether an object seen in satellite images of a small Pacific island might be remnants of the Lockheed Electra 10-E that Purdue Research Foundation helped Earhart finance during her time as a counselor and instructor on the West Lafayette campus.
They’ll be at Nikumaroro, roughly midway between Hawaii and Australia, to check out what has become known as the Taraia Object in a lagoon where researchers believe Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan might have landed, never to be found.
“Honestly, just to be a part of a team that is attempting to answer one of the most talked about questions in aviation in history, and to be a part of this incredible crew that’s going out there to do this and contribute to Amelia Earhart’s legacy, even in just a small way, is an immense privilege,” Sirisha Bandla, Purdue graduate, astronaut and expedition member, said this week.
A few takeaways from this week’s advance briefing:
Getting there and the initial work: Steve Schultz, Purdue general counsel and a member of the crew, was already in Kiribati, meeting with officials there and talking about potential collaborations with Purdue. The rest of the crew is expected to leave from Los Angeles this weekend to fly to Fiji and then to Tarawa, Kiribati. The 16-member crew is expected to travel six days by ship to Nikumaroro. From there, it’s a matter of getting ashore and across the lagoon – “and that’s not quite as simple as it sounds,” Richard Pettigrew, Archaeological Legacy Institute executive director who is leading the team, said.
“We have to cut our way through the forest there – it’s basically a jungle,” Pettigrew said. “It’s about 300 yards, and we’ll be hacking our way through to the lagoon. We’re also going to be bringing two boats around through a passage into the lagoon that will transport us across the lagoon to the site. We have to cross the lagoon every day. … That first day, that’s what we’re going to do.”
From there, the crew will set up remote sensing gear, internet connections and solar power at the site, Pettigrew said. The following days will include looking at the object with a magnetometer sonar before the team dives 30 feet to the object to start to uncover it from the layers of silt.
If it is the plane: Schultz said the plan is built around “keeping in touch with the world despite our remote circumstances.”
“Certainly, that news we will seek to get out as quickly as we can,” Schultz said. “I know a lot of eyes are on us.”
Pettigrew said that if the crew finds that the object is Earhart’s plane, the days will be spent understanding “its physical situation.”
“Once we have a handle on that, and presuming that we’re correct about our identification that it is the Electra, or really the remainder of the Electra, we would then plan to come back the following year and do a full-scale archeological excavation in the same manner as you might imagine that an archeology team would do for a submerged shipwreck,” Pettigrew said.
Any sort of recovery operation, if deemed possible, wouldn’t start for two years, he said.
And if it isn’t the plane: The crew continued to hedge their bets.
“Knowing what we know – there’s a lot of evidence supporting this hypothesis – we can’t turn our backs on it,” Pettigrew said. “We can’t avoid going there. We have to go there, regardless of the outcome. We are obliged to go there, so I feel that even in the case in which we discover that it’s something other than the Electra, we will be successful by identifying what it is.”
Schultz said: “We’re testing a hypothesis here based on the evidence, and we’re either going to rule in the proposition that is the Electra, and at long last we will have solved the greatest mystery of the 20th century, or we’ll determine that it’s something else. … But if we get the privilege of putting a final chapter on the Amelia story, again, that would be such an honor and a privilege. Either way, we’re going to be looking forward to chronicling the journey and telling the world about it.”
Watch the full conversation here:
Here’s more about the expedition, how it came about and Purdue’s stakes:
$7.5B DATA CENTER PLAN IN FRANKFORT ADVANCES; A 20-MILE TIPPECANOE COUNTY ANGLE
Facing both pushback Monday night from a crowd at the Clinton County Fairgrounds and pressures on the city’s revenues under state-mandated property tax reform, the Frankfort City Council voted 5-2 for a financial agreement and incentive package with DataOne, a French-based company looking to develop a $7.5 billion data center on 115 acres at Frankfort’s Logix Innovation Campus, at 3500 West County Road 0 North/South, about five miles east of Interstate 65.
The Clinton County Daily News had a wrap-up of the night, the incentive package, the city council’s hopes for a development the city’s financial consultant said could fund 41% of Frankfort’s annual budget through 2054, and plenty of concerns about water consumption, available power and the political process during the 2½-hour special meeting: “Frankfort Council Approves DataOne Agreement After Hours of Public Comment.”
Find video of the Frankfort City County’s special meeting here.
The company says the project would include an 800,000-square-foot facility it called an AI factory – which it differentiated from data centers that store, processes and distributes digital data as “a high-density facility specifically designed to train and run artificial intelligence models.” The company is aiming to break ground in late 2026 or early 2027, with construction taking 18 to 24 months. The project would include the company building two additional substations for power, with the data center running off 350 megawatts coming from the grid and 175 megawatts from on-site fuel cells; a closed-loop cooling system that would use approximately 22,000 gallons of water a day; and call for 200 jobs once it opens.
One twist from the development: The project from neighboring Clinton County would be the first along the edges of Tippecanoe County that could trigger a 20-mile rule local planners have proposed as part of a list of restrictions on large-scale data centers. According to a proposal scheduled to be heard Oct. 21 by the Area Plan Commission, new large data centers would need to be separated by at least 20 miles from any other large data center. The proposal would include the distance to data centers built in neighboring counties. That would leave room, conceivably, for one large-scale data center in Tippecanoe County, if it could get zoning and other approvals. A 20-mile radius from the DataOne project, on the west side of Frankfort, would push into Lafayette and include much of eastern and southern Tippecanoe County.
Here’s more on Tippecanoe County’s proposed data center zoning regulations, scheduled to be considered by the Area Plan Commission at 6 p.m. Oct. 21 at the County Office Building, 20 N. Third St.
WEST LAFAYETTE SEWER RATES INCREASING, BUT NOT FOR $95M IN PROPOSED BONDS FOR WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT EXPANSION, CITY SAYS
The West Lafayette City Council on Monday will consider issuing up to $95 million in bonds to pay for a wastewater treatment plant expansion that would increase capacity from 10.5 million gallons a day to 15 million gallons a day.
