But it may well be designed for ELINT, recording cellphone & internet traffic, perhaps monitoring military radar & nuclear command and control comms. The overflight may well have been intended to learn what they could electronically and, more importantly, watch how the US reacted when they detected it.
If the thing is doing visual / camera recon, that may simply be a sign the Chinese recon satellites don’t have quite the resolution they’d like. Nor the persistence. Yet.
Last of all, upthread I cited the US SRTM from 20 years ago. I’d be somewhat surprised if a balloon would be a great tool for a similar mission, just due to power requirements. OTOH, modern solar cells & batteries are marvels compared to 20-40 years ago and that is one mongo balloon. They could still get some darn nice radar data if they could drive the thing close to where they wanted to look. Which might be very useful for deriving guidance data for maneuvering hypersonic ICBM RVs & shorter range attack missiles.
We do similar shit all the time, so I’m not all bent out of shape about Chinese recklessness, temerity, evil, or whatever. IMO @Rick_Kitchen nailed it a couple posts ago. But that’s not to say the Chinese are necessarily peacefully researching weather or aurora borealis or stratospheric chemistry or whatever cover story they choose to use. WB-57s weren’t gathering data on pollen to improve honey production either. Despite what NOAA / NASA said.
As for the payload, my SWAG:
As most people know, it’s easier to pick up low power radio signals the closer you get.
I am an amateur radio hobbyist and I doubt that satellites can even identify the frequency of many low power signals that our military uses on ICBM sites. Look at a radio spectrum waterfall. The noise level exceeds many low level transmissions. You can see that somethings there, but there’s a lot of spurious signals in the radio spectrum so you can’t be sure what it is.
So, if they are close enough to discover our low power spectrum, they just might make a note to jam those frequencies to disrupt communications if the need arose.
Now for those that want to remind me that the frequency that our armed forces use changes; yes it does. -But the footprint it leaves on the waterfall might be identifiable and easier to track. One could program a scanner to monitor a wide range and concentrate on the footprint.
As a reminder, I’m a hobbyist. IANASIGNET.
I want an American balloon to go over Zhongnanhai or Tienanmen square and slowly sink down to about 100-foot level, then rise up to 90,000, then back down, ad infinitum, for trollery
If launched from the US, you’d be lucky to get a balloon within 1000 miles of either of those places. Hell, you’d be lucky to get to go over any part of China. And that’s why I think this was no spy balloon. Untethered balloons are one of the worst ways to try to spy on a particular place. There’s probably a dozen or more ways to be more certain to get results.
From what I’ve read, they’ve been launching these balloons for years, probably dozens of launches. They’ve been going in all different directions, as balloons are wont to do, but when one happens to go across the US, suddenly it’s a spy. That has to be one of the least effective spy technologies ever.
So I’m not buying the spy notion. Now if they’d launched from somewhere much closer to the US, say off a ship just outside the territorial waters, then I might give it some credence. Considering its trajectory, it clearly was not launched from such a location.
That’s right. Here’s that graphic again from an earlier post; why China wants to spy on the Andaman Islands is anyone’s guess.
Acknowledgements to Metabunk.
Oops – missed the by plane type part. That would be tricky. To be sure you’d have to track down each of the pilots’ squadrons and from there find which plane the group was flying at the time.
According to a Defense Department briefing given by Gen. Ryder on Feb 3, this was absolutely a spy balloon. Gen. Ryder refused to give specifics on most details when asked.
For me, it’s a moot point because it is a device launched by a major power that has been hostile towards the United States, and it is over United States air space. That’s certainly enough cause to bring it down and examine it in detail.
What gives you that idea? Spy balloons certainly have existed; while they have generally been superseded by satellites I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there may be certain functions (interception of low-power radio traffic, perhaps) where a balloon would be equal or superior.
This is only one balloon out of a program of more than a dozen launches in the last few years, including at least three which have intruded on US airspace. This one only managed to attract attention because it passed over the Malmstrom ICBM sites; it seems very likely that this was an accident, rather than by design, since none of the others came near sensitive sites.
Maybe the Chinese were able to gather SIGINT/ELINT data from these flights, but I suspect this was only a fortuitous side effect. Such a huge balloon could not be kept secret when flying over inhabited locations.
I mean, one possibility is that it’s just a form of trolling. We’ll send an inexpensive “weather balloon” over the US and get some info on how they react and cause a political headache while they’re at it.
