puckrock2000: Marcus Aurelius: Unsung_Hero: I really don't understand what game China is playing when they officially complain that the US downed something that was illegally in US airspace.  Nor does it seem particularly wise to continue to claim it was a meteorological instrumentation package drifting on the wind when it had been observed to have some navigation capability and China never informed the US of the balloon prior to it being spotted... and the US is almost certainly going to recover enough hardware to determine what the balloon's general capabilities were.

Balloons do not have navigation abilities.  The thought itself is risible.

"We saw it do that. It loitered over certain sites. It went left, right. We saw it maneuver inside the jet stream. That's how it was operating," the official said, adding that the craft had propellers and rudders.

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DrEMHmrk2: As someone who's got some SCUBA SAR experience, if they had a team of trained divers, say 40-50 people, working in groups of 4, they will have already completely canvased their "15 football field" search area, have pulled up and geolocated anything movable by hand, marked medium sized pieces, and set floats to the big stuff.

Floating debris of any size was most likely picked up right away by the surface vessels. Super light material like mylar or small envelope fragments probably took an hour or more to settle down to the water and I have no expertise there.

Long story short, we've collected pretty much everything already, and they're slowly releasing the photos while they investigate and stage the pieces into a reconstruction.

My guess? Really high end multispectral imaging equipment and lidar, good for civil and spy use, so the plausible deniability will be strong with this one. I'd still shoot the next one down, but this time right as it enters our airspace, with the threat that the next one we see heading off the mainland of china will be treated as an intentional incoming attack.