A Chinese balloon violated US airspace, an incident serious enough to prevent a high-level diplomatic meeting between the US and Beijing
The US military shot down a so-called Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, 2023. Officials said the US Navy was planning to salvage the wreck, which lies in shallow water.
The United States and Canada followed the balloon’s path as it crossed the Aleutian Islands, passed through Western Canada, and entered U.S. airspace over Idaho. U.S. Department of Defense officials confirmed on Feb. 2, 2023, that the military tracked the balloon as it flew over the mainland U.S. at an altitude of about 60,000 feet, hovering over Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. The base is home to the 341st Missile Wing, which operates nuclear-powered ICBMs.
The next day, Chinese officials acknowledged the balloon was theirs, but denied it was for espionage or intended to enter US airspace. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the balloon attack had led him to cancel his trip to Beijing. He was scheduled to meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang on February 5 and 6.
The Pentagon has reported that a second supposedly Chinese balloon has been spotted over Latin America. On Feb. 4, officials told reporters that a third Chinese surveillance balloon was operating in a different part of the world and that the balloons are part of a Chinese military surveillance program.
Surveillance of an opponent from a balloon dates back to 1794, when the French used a hot air balloon to track Austrian and Dutch troops at the Battle of Fleurus.
Aerospace engineer Iain Boyd of the University of Colorado Boulder explains how spy balloons work and why anyone in the 21st century would use one.
A spy balloon is literally a gas-filled balloon that flies quite high in the sky, about where commercial airplanes fly. It has advanced cameras and imaging technology, and all those instruments point straight down. Collect information through images of what is happening on the ground.
A Chinese high-altitude balloon floated over the US, entered over Montana and hovered over the central part of the country, prompting the US to send fighter jets into the air and provoking an angry response from the US government.
Satellites are the preferred method of spying from the sky. Currently, spy satellites generally fly overhead in two types of orbits.
The first is called Low Earth Orbit, and as the name suggests, those satellites are relatively close to the ground. But they are still several hundred kilometers above us. When taking pictures and photos, the closer you are to something, the more clearly you can see it, and this also applies to espionage. Satellites that are in low Earth orbit have the advantage of being closer to Earth, so they can see things more clearly than satellites that are further away.
The downside of these low-Earth orbit satellites is that they are constantly moving around the Earth. They take about 90 minutes to make a full turn, too fast to get clear pictures of what’s happening below.
The second type of satellite orbit is called a geosynchronous orbit and is much further out. It has the disadvantage that it is more difficult to see things clearly. But they have the advantage of what we call persistence, which allows satellites to continuously capture images. In those orbits you always see exactly the same part of the earth’s surface because the satellite moves with the earth, it rotates at the same speed.
In a sense, a balloon is the best solution. They are much closer to the ground than any satellite, so they can see more clearly. And of course the balloons move, but they do it relatively slowly, so they also have a certain amount of persistence. However, spying with balloons is not common these days as they are a relatively easy target and not fully controllable.
I don’t know what technology is inside this spy balloon, but it’s probably different types of cameras collecting different types of information.
Today, images are acquired in different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Humans see in a certain range of that spectrum, the visible spectrum. So if we have a camera and we take a picture of our dog, the result is a visible picture. That’s one of the things spy planes do. They take normal pictures, although they have very good zoom capabilities to magnify what they see.
But different types of information can also be picked up in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. A well-known one is infrared. If it’s nighttime, a camera operating in the visible part of the spectrum won’t show us anything because everything is dark. But an infrared camera can pick up heat emission in the dark.
Most of these balloons literally go where the wind blows. There may be some navigation, but there are certainly no people on board. They are at the mercy of the weather. Sometimes they carry guidance devices that change the height of the balloon to accommodate wind in certain directions. US officials reportedly said the Chinese surveillance balloon had propellers to help steer it. If confirmed, it means that your operator has quite a bit of control over the trajectory of the balloon.
There is an internationally accepted limit called the Kármán line at 100 kilometers altitude. This balloon was well below that limit, so it was in US airspace.
The Pentagon has had programs in recent decades to explore what new things can be done with balloons. Maybe they’re bigger, maybe they can reach higher into the atmosphere to make it harder to shoot them down or take them out. Maybe they could be more persistent.
The great interest in this incident illustrates its unusual nature. Few people would expect a country to actively use spy balloons these days.
The United States flew many balloons over the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s, later replaced by high-altitude spy planes, the U-2s, and later by satellites.
black and white photo of a group of men holding ropes to a large balloon being inflated from a truck in the desert
Project Moby Dick was an early Cold War effort by the United States to track the Soviet Union from high-altitude balloons. US Air Force Public Affairs
I’m sure a number of countries have periodically reconsidered the use of balloons: Are there other things we could do with balloons now that we couldn’t do before? Do they fill the gaps we have with satellites and planes?
China has complained for years that the United States is spying on it from satellites and ships. China is also known for its somewhat provocative behavior, cruising close to other countries’ borders and making “saber chatter.” I think this incident falls into this category.
The balloon poses no real threat to the United States. Sometimes China just experiments to see how far it can go. This is not really very advanced technology. It serves no real military purpose. I think some political message is much more likely.
This article was published in ‘The Conversation’.
Source: La Verdad
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