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Robert Ballard has no doubt he will be the man to solve one of the most well known mysteries of history: the disappearance of Amelia Earhart‘s plane.

An oceanographer and former Navy officer, the 77-year-old made a name for himself discovering iconic ships, such as the Titanic, the Bismarck and even John F. Kennedy‘s sunken PT-109.

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Now, on Thursday he’s taking off from a California airport and headed to Nikumaroro, an uninhabited Pacific island where one theory posits that Earhart emergency-landed her plane before her disappearance.

“I wouldn’t be going if I wasn’t confident…. Failure is not an option in our business,” Ballard said on the phone from Beverly Hills. “If I get one piece, I get them all.”

Ballard said he’s doing this for his mom and Earhart, who was also from his home state of Kansas.

He believes, based on a lot of the evidence collected by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, that Earhart did not crash somewhere in the Pacific, nor was she taken prisoner by the Japanese. Instead, every bone in his body tells him all signs point to Nikumaroro.