Ten explorers and scientists from the US and Turkey will embark on an expedition on July 15 to scale Mount Ararat, 4,700 metres (15,000ft) above sea level, to determine what is behind the image that has been picked up by spy satellites in the past two decades.

New satellite pictures suggest a huge 14-metre-high structure that was exposed when the heatwave that hit Europe last summer melted the snowcap that had obscured it for years.

The expedition will be led by Ahmet Ali Arslan, an English professor at Seljuk University in Turkey. An experienced mountaineer, he has already scaled Mt Ararat 40 times and grew up around the mountain range.

"The slopes are very, very harsh and dangerous on the northern face - it is extremely challenging, mentally and physically," said Mr Arslan, who was once a prime-ministerial aide.

The expedition can only occur with the consent of the Turkish government, and Mr Arslan will meet the prime minister next week to discuss the proposed trip. The estimated cost is £500,000 and will be met by Daniel McGivern, a businessman and Christian activist from Hawaii.

At a press conference to announce the trip this week he said: "We are not excavating it. We're going to photograph it and, God willing, you're all going to see it."

"These new photos unequivocally show a man-made object," he added. "I am convinced that the excavation of the object and the results of tests run on any collected samples will prove that it is Noah's ark."

Mr McGivern's Trinity Corporation last year used Quick Bird, the world's highest resolution satellite, to photograph the anomaly.

He has said he is 98% sure that the object is the ark, because of beams of wood he said were visible in the images.

The Bible says that the ark, packed with either seven or two of each creature, male and female, on earth, came to rest on the mountains of Ararat after the great floods - thought to have occurred in 5,600BC, when the Mediterranean flooded into the basin where the Black Sea now sits.

Sceptics have pointed out that Noah would have had to load 460 organisms a second to fill the ark with two of each species in 24 hours as the Bible suggests.

The object on Mount Ararat was first noticed by the CIA in 1949 from a spy plane.

Turkish pilots saw it again 10 years later, and the pictures began to reinforce the myth around the vessel, giving Christians apparent archeological evidence that part of Genesis could be physically substantiated.

The region was off limits until 1982 because of Soviet complaints that explorers were spying. Since then, teams of explorers have tried to reach the ark, but failed to substantiate what the object is.