The United States said on Friday it had successfully completed a recovery operation off South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a US fighter jet on February 4, and researchers are now examining its “innards”, Reuters reported. .

The US Navy has discovered the remains of a Chinese surveillance balloonPhoto: US Navy / Zuma Press / Profimedia Images

The last remnants of a Chinese balloon shot down by a Sidewinder missile are on their way to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, the US Northern Command said in a statement.

Restoration work was suspended on Thursday.

“It’s a significant amount of (recovered material), including the payload structure and some electronic and optical components, all of which are now at the FBI’s Quantico lab,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. .

Kirby stated that the United States had already learned a lot about the balloon by watching it as it flew over the United States.

“We think we’ll learn even more when we look inside and see how it worked and what it was capable of,” he said during a White House news conference.

The US military said Navy and Coast Guard ships that had been searching the sea for nearly two weeks had left the area.

“Air and sea security perimeters have been increased,” the Northern Command said in a statement.

The U.S. military said it believed it had collected all the key sensors and electronics of the Chinese balloon, as well as large parts of its structure, elements that could help counterintelligence officials determine how Beijing was able to collect and transmit intelligence.

The Chinese balloon, which Beijing denies is a government reconnaissance craft, flew for a week over the United States and Canada before it was shot down off the Atlantic coast on the orders of President Joe Biden.

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