The United States announced today that it has successfully completed recovery efforts in South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a US fighter jet in February, according to “guts.”
The final pieces of debris from the Chinese balloon, brought down by a Sidewinder missile, are en route to an FBI lab in Virginia for analysis, the US military’s Northern Command said in a statement.
Portal was the first to report the completion of recovery efforts, which were halted on Thursday.
“It’s a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure and some electronics and optics, and it’s all in the FBI’s lab at Quantico now,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.
Kirby said the United States had already learned a lot about the balloon by watching it fly over the United States.
The US military said Navy and Coast Guard vessels that have been combing the sea for nearly two weeks have evacuated the area.
“Air and sea security perimeters have been lifted,” the Northern Command said in a statement.
The US military said it believes it has collected all of the Chinese balloon’s priority sensors and electronics, as well as much of its structure, items that could help counterintelligence agencies determine how Beijing may have collected and transmitted the surveillance information.