Divers off the coast of Florida have discovered the remains of the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded in 1986, while searching for a World War II plane wreckage.
According to the American Space Agency (NASA), while filming a documentary, they noticed a piece of wreckage sticking out of the seabed off the east coast of the Sunshine State.
The find offers an opportunity to pause and think of the seven people who died in the Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986, a NASA spokesman said on Thursday.
The space shuttle burst into flames over Cape Canaveral 73 seconds after launch on its tenth mission.
NASA later blamed a sealing ring on a solid fuel rocket, which had been stressed by a cold snap, for the explosion at an altitude of about 15 kilometers.
In addition to the commander Francis "Dick" Scobee and five other astronauts, the teacher Christa McAuliffe was killed in what was then the most devastating accident in American space travel.
The thirty-eight-year-old from New Hampshire was selected from a pool of more than 11,000 applicants to teach from the space shuttle for NASA's Teachers in Space program.
In the years after the accident, wreckage from the Challenger washed up on the Florida coast.
NASA stored the remains of the space shuttle in former missile silos at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The space agency left it open whether the four-meter-long piece of wreckage that the divers have now discovered will find a place there.