The mystery of Amelia Earhart may soon be solved if the plane-shaped mass discovered in the Pacific Ocean late last year turns out to be her long-lost Lockheed 10-E Electra.

Tony Romeo and his Deep Sea Vision team — which captured the sonar image of the familiar-looking object during a December expedition to find her plane — are planning a second trip to what they believe could be Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan’s watery grave.

Last week, The Post examined what condition the infamous aircraft could be in after nearly nine decades at 15,000 feet in the Pacific Ocean and what the surviving damage could tell us about how the pair spent their final moments.

Getting to the wreck, however, presents its own cache of questions.

What will recovery of Amelia Earhart’s plane look like?”

Retrieving the wreckage will be a long and arduous — and expensive — mission.

The depth where her plane is purported to be has been integral to preserving the suspected aircraft — but will prove to be a detriment to recovery expeditions.

At nearly 3 miles undersea — more than 3,000 feet deeper than the Titanic — the intense pressure makes it risky to send people to investigate the scene, leading the Deep Sea Vision team to look toward utilizing remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to carry most of the load.

Ocean engineering expert M. Reza Alam pointed out that it will likely take multiple ROVs to work in painstakingly accurate tandem to lift the massive plane off the ocean floor.

Because the infamous Lockheed 10-E Electra will be in some stage of decay, the machines will need to work slowly to move it to ensure no pieces are accidentally ripped apart.

“The remains have a fragile state,” Alam told The Post.

“They are properly broken in pieces. They have corroded parts that are susceptible to more damage during recovery attempts, so it must be handled with extreme care,” he continued, adding that marine organisms have also taken over the plane, transforming it into a living vessel.

The technicians operating the ROVs would also need to keep the contents of the cabin in mind — particularly the delicate handwritten notes and maps that the Deep Sea Vision team hopes have survived nearly nine decades underwater, but could tear at the slightest sloshing.

Although the machines will be equipped with cameras, each would need an almost 3-mile-long cable to connect to the ship above to transmit any form of wireless communication, including Wi-Fi and GPS.

The logistical challenges don’t even touch the possibility of environmental-related or weather-related problems that could arise on the mission, which Alam estimates will take several days to complete.

With many ROVs costing upward of $200,000 per day, the recovery crew could be shelling out a couple of million dollars at a minimum to resurrect the iconic aircraft.

The Deep Sea Vision team has not decided whether or not it would send humans down to the site, which could pose the risk of an implosion as seen with the Titan submersible disaster last year.

“A lot of challenges are there: pressure, depth, underwater wireless communication, environmental conditions, strong currents, rough seas, unpredictable weather storms. These all make the recovery operations difficult and dangerous,” said Alam, the American Bureau of Shipping chair for ocean engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Where would Earhart’s plane go?

Once fully recovered from the ocean’s depths, Earhart’s plane would go through several heavy rounds of probing.

The federal National Transportation Safety Board would lead the investigative charge into the crash — but only after a positive identification of the wreckage.

The government’s role would be obligatory whether or not the plane was recovered from international or US waters because it was registered to an American.

Several other stakeholders could come out of the woodwork to get their hands on Earhart’s infamous plane, including Purdue University, the Illinois institution where she worked as a career counselor and adviser to the Department of Aeronautics from 1935 until her 1937 disappearance.

The university — which helped fund the red Vega plane Earhart flew on her historic 1932 journey across the Atlantic and US — was in talks to retain her aircraft for exhibition purposes before she vanished and has since discussed potentially displaying the Electra 10-E airplane, if recovered, at the under-construction Amelia Earhart Terminal at the Purdue University Airport.

While the plane’s future is far from certain, Romeo would like to see it embark on a “traveling expedition” across the country, with a stop in her hometown of Atchison, Kansas, and a final resting place at the National Air and Space Museum — right next to her red Vega plane.

According to Romeo, that dream is shared by her surviving family.

“I see them, as I think the family does, too, as fallen soldiers in a war and we’re bringing them home. Any argument that says we should leave them down there — I actually think that’s disrespectful,” Romeo said.

“If we find their grave site — bring them back home. I think she’d want that. I don’t think she wants to be sitting at the Pacific,” he continued.

“Eventually the plane is going to disintegrate. In a couple hundred years, the plane will be gone.”

What’s next for Earhart’s plane?

Unfortunately, it will be a few more years before the public can set their eyes on Earhart’s long-lost plane — if the mass seen in the sonar images is indeed her aircraft.

Deep Sea Vision is still mapping out its plans for its second visit to the site, where it will deploy ROVs to get a closer look and — hopefully — confirm it’s Earhart’s plane.

Only then could the crew plan their third mission, which would involve the steps for recovery.

“As you can imagine, getting these expeditions together is, logistically, quite a challenge. You’ve got people, you’ve got equipment, there’s very few ships actually available in that area of the central Pacific, believe it or not,” Romeo said.

The second voyage is tentatively planned for early 2025, with an optimistic possibility it can begin at the end of 2024.

That doesn’t mean Romeo and his team might not sneak another trip in before then to visit the potential crash zone — the location of which they have kept top-secret since the discovery.

“We’ve talked about going back secretly and looking at things. I wouldn’t confirm or deny that, but I would say that we have talked about that possibility,” he teased.