Swedish accident investigators plan to raise the car ramp from the Baltic Sea ferry MS Estonia, which sank in Finnish waters in 1994, for examination.
The doomed ferry's bow visor was pulled from the sea shortly after the ship sank, a tragedy which claimed 852 lives, but the vessel's vehicle ramp has remained with the rest of the wreckage at the bottom of the Baltic for nearly 30 years.
Investigators plan to lift the ramp in the early summer, according to the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority's Jonas Bäckstrand.
Sweden has set aside around 2.1 million euros for the ramp lifting effort. The Swedish government said in a statement issued on Tuesday that investigators will raise the ramp to the surface as well as photograph and video record inside the shipwreck's car deck.
In a government statement, Sweden's civil defence minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said that it will never be possible to answer all the questions about what happened that tragic night.
"But if the planned investigations can contribute to an increased understanding of what happened when the ship sank, the government's assessment is that they should be carried out," he said in the statement.
In January, a refreshed examination of the tragedy found that the ship was unseaworthy and that there were no indications of an explosion in the vessel's bow, as had been suggested in a TV documentary.
That new probe was based on the results of findings presented in 1997 by the Joint Accident Investigation Commission (JAIC).
The Estonia sank in the Baltic Sea on the night of 28 September 1994, claiming the lives of 852 people as it was headed to Stockholm, Sweden from Tallinn, Estonia.
Only 137 people survived the tragedy, which was one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th century.
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