Uncovering the Truth: Investigating the Chinese-Origin Balloon Sighting Over North Carolina

A balloon sighting over North Carolina

Investigators will be looking for clues as to why a Chinese-origin balloon flew over US airspace last week when they recover the plane’s wreckage.

The balloon that the Pentagon claims was spying on sensitive military sites was shot down over US territorial waters on Saturday.

Debris was spread over a wide area off the South Carolina coast.

China insists it was a weather ship blown astray and has expressed “strong dissatisfaction” with its downing.

US Navy divers are working to recover as much debris from the balloon as possible, including equipment on board.

What do investigators hope to learn once the balloon debris is recovered?

“We don’t know exactly all the benefits that will result. But we learned technical things about this balloon and its surveillance capabilities,” a senior defense official told reporters on Saturday. “And I suspect if we manage to recover some of the debris, we’ll learn even more.”

Experts speaking to the BBC said the balloon’s contents were key to uncovering its purpose and capabilities.

Iain Boyd, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, said neither the official statements from Beijing nor Washington make sense so far.

“There are doubts on both sides and that’s partly what’s interesting about all of this,” he said. “I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle of all of this.”

Mr Boyd said that if rescue teams recover enough of the instruments, they can likely know how much information they held, what type of information was processed and whether processed data was or has been sent back to China.

Seeing the balloon up close — and finding out if it had features like propellers or communications equipment — will also help determine if it was remotely piloted, he said.

Even if the software was corrupted or somehow deleted, Mr Boyd argued investigators will be able to assess things like the resolution and quality of any surveillance footage it may have captured.

“It would be very surprising if there is technology on this platform that the US doesn’t already have an equivalent form of, but it gives intelligence here the potential to understand the technological maturity of the Chinese for these types of applications,” he said.

The US will try to find any sensors in the balloon’s wreckage to help uncover the plane’s purpose, said Gregory Falco, an assistant professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Civil and Systems Engineering.

But that won’t be easy, he told the BBC, because the sensors – which detect different types of wavelengths – are usually small and may have been damaged after the US military shot down the spy balloon. He said it was unclear from video footage of the incident how severe the damage to the plane was.

Like the US, China is a “pretty smart adversary” and also likely planned for the plane to self-destruct or encrypt data as part of the spy mission, said Dr. Falcon.

“Shooting that thing down was a show of national pride more than anything because I’m not sure what we’re going to get from it,” he said.

But information from the downed balloon could help US officials “understand their opponent a little bit better,” he said.

The US could reveal how the data captured by the plane was sent back to China, said Dr. Falcon. The country may have used a “hybrid satellite network” that uses high-altitude platforms to relay data to the nearest orbital-friendly satellite. Once in a safe area, the satellite connects to a ground station or antenna that acts as a control system, said Dr. Falcon.

China has “a huge array of ground stations located outside of China,” said Dr. Falcon. As long as the balloon was able to link to a satellite, which would then link to a ground station, China was “done with its data” and could delete the balloon, he said.

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