The US defence department has released a close-up image of the Chinese spy balloon complete with recon sensors and solar panels as it hovered over the American mainland.
A U-2 pilot is pictured flying high above the the large white orb, which sparked international controversy, just a day before the Air Force shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean.
The photo shows the top of the pilot’s helmet inside the U-2 cockpit with the white fabric balloon carrying reconnaissance sensors, antennae, and solar power panels flying below.
The equipment it was carrying was described as being equal in length to three school buses.
The photo was taken on February 3 as the balloon “hovered over the Central Continental United States,” according to the caption provided by the Defense Department.
The Pentagon released the image on Wednesday, more than two weeks after the balloon made international headlines as it transited the United States.
The balloon was downed on February 4 by an F-22 fighter jet firing a AIM-9X Sidewinder missile. The strike took place once the balloon was no longer over land but was still within US territorial waters.
The U-2 Dragon Lady is a high altitude US spy plane that has been in service since the 1950s.
The Pentagon announced last Friday that Navy ships and submersibles had completed recovery of the massive balloon and its payload, which fell in pieces into the Atlantic Ocean.
John Kirby, national security spokesman for The White House, said the wreckage included “electronics and optics” but declined to say what the US had learned from it so far.
“It’s a significant amount of recovered material, including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, and all that’s now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico,” Mr Kirby said.
Mr Kirby said the US had already learned a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the United States, adding: “We’re going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of.”
The shootdown led to three other smaller objects also being shot down by Air Force jets within a period of eight days: one over Alaska, one over Canada and one over Lake Huron.
Three other objects were shot down over North America last week.
One was about the size of a small car and was downed over sea ice in Alaska, another was similar in shape but smaller than the Chinese spy balloon brought down over Canada’s Yukon and an octagonal object shot down over Lake Huron.
While the military is confident the balloon shot down off South Carolina was a surveillance airship operated by China, the Biden administration has admitted that the three smaller objects were likely civilian-owned balloons that were targeted during the heightened response.
