t
he military has had some success in recovering pieces of the Chinese spy balloon that it shot down on Saturday after it traversed the continental United States last week.
U.S. officials acknowledged that the recovery efforts are just getting started, though the Navy and Coast Guard, which are leading the recovery operation, have recovered some of it since a U.S. F-22 fighter jet fired a missile on Saturday afternoon, bringing down the Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean near the coast of the Carolinas.
The USS Carter Hall and USS Pathfinder are in the area. The former is focused on “collecting debris [and] categorizing the debris since arrival,” the commander of NORAD and USNORTHCOM, Gen. Glen VanHerck, told reporters on Monday, while the latter is focused on using unmanned underwater vehicles eventually to “produce us a map” of the suspected debris field.
There are other naval vessels in the area to ensure the safety and security of the mission, he added. Providing new insight on the size of the Chinese surveillance spy balloon, VanHerck said the assessment was that the actual balloon was “up to 200 feet tall,” while he described the payload “as a jet airliner type of size, maybe a regional jet” and said it probably weighed “in excess of a couple thousand pounds.”
