Chinese "Spy Balloon" over CONUS.

originally posted by: kloejen
a reply to: Zaphod58

But you dont know if it carried any "spy-hardware". Ofc there will be a transmitter to satellites, and if its "spy-data", then it wont be stored onboard.

0 proof.

The US can spin any story they want...

It was sending out encrypted data.
That was a violation of the international rules for weather balloons flying over other countries.
That gave any country the right to shoot it down. IF THEY COULD.

Looks like they've fished a good percentage of the payload out of the Sea. No matter what they say - how much, or how little - there are going to be those that echo the Chinese sentiment that it was a 'civilian' weather balloon.

I call total BS on that conclusion. I'm a firm believer of occam's razor.

The straight forward explanation is that these 'low-tech' spy balloons have exploited 40 countries' airspace and on the face of it, they got away with it.

Hopefully, whatever these things were transmitting back were being monitored.

In light of the extent of problem, on the 6th Feburary, the commander in charge of protecting American skies revealed that: "The Pentagon failed to detect Chinese surveillance balloons that have previously entered US airspace."

“As NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”

NORAD Statement

This low tech exploitation is exactly what Zaphod mentioned in one of his previous posts.

a reply to: Zaphod58

We think we can limit the data. Whether we were able to or not... that's something we will maybe find out in the future.

Jamming depends on several assumptions.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

Any ideas regarding the amount of power a setup like this would need to acquire, process, and relay its data forward to a satellite in orbit for days at a time? While maintaining command communications for guidance, and powering its motors and aerodynamic surfaces?

If it was all done with solar panels and batteries, it should be possible to calculate its potential battery mass based on the available square footage for PV panels (and an estimate of their conversion efficiency).

We'd have to add in the potential power consumption of a heating system to keep any battery package warm enough at altitude to maintain power output, too.

a reply to: horatio321

The 9X was used like an arrow. It worked well! No fuse required. If you pop a balloon with a pin at home, the balloon end up shredded. No explosives required.

A balloon at home pops and shreds because of the high pressure inside it. Transport balloons do not have such pressure; they work by heating the medium inside, reducing density, or by filling it with a low-density gas. Since this one was so maneuverable, it likely used heat to achieve the needed buoyancy.

Airships, when they were popular, had minimal altitude control. They had to land with the assistance of people on the ground with ropes. What altitude they had consisted of air pumps that could fill pressure containers with compressed air to weight thee ship down or release the compressed air to make it float higher. They had very good directional control, though.

That said, I can see how a supersonic missile passing close enough by could create sufficient eddies to rip and shred the thin balloon material. That's actually a good point.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Mantiss2021

High altitude balloons are actually designed to shred.

In most countries, yes they are. However, this is China and it's not even over Chinese airspace. I wouldn't place a lot of faith in China obeying US regulations. or even international regulations.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

Sure it does, but an even better way to limit it is to limit the electronic signals going out as it passes overhead. Obviously we can’t stop all of them, but we can pretty drastically reduce what can be gotten.

a reply to: Zaphod58

It looks more like an array of solar panels to me. Ofc you can hide an antenna behind it... so

0 proof

But now China can spin any story they want...

We been down this road before. Plausible deniability.

Ohh and a bonus!

"Chinese warplane comes dangerously close to US spy plane over South China Sea"



What are US Spy planes doing in the Chinese sea?

a reply to: TheRedneck

Not really a regulation as much a matter of common sense; you want the envelope to shred as a way to minimize the possibility of having the deflated cell get tangled up in your payload, causing an uncontrolled descent.

If you take a look at the video I referenced earlier, that is exactly what almost happened to that twin balloon airship; one of the cells deflated, but failed to shred.

Even if you intend to destroy your payload instead of recovering it, you want the gas cells to clear clean away to prevent the self-destruct of the payload from being complete. We're not talking about pounds of simtex here, that would be excessively heavy and complete overkill to rip up an otherwise fragile framework.

In fact, given that any batteries this vehicle might have used were probably LiOn batteries, which do not like water (as any firefighter who ever had to extinguish a burning Tesla could tell you), it's kind of odd that the Navy is supposedly worried about there being explosives still active amid the airship debris.

a reply to: kloejen

Of course. It was just a simple weather balloon that got lost. Not for spying at all. The Chinese government is 100% innocent. This is just more warmongering from the evil US government trying to start the next war.

a reply to: kloejen

The same thing Russian planes are doing near the US, and Chinese planes are doing near Japan. Oh wait, that’s totally acceptable right?

a reply to: Mantiss2021

That depends on a lot of factors. Different frequencies require different power levels, and the speed of any onboard data processing would require power proportional to the speed of the processor. The maneuvering power would depend on how much it was adjusted during flight, as well as the maximum amount it could maneuver. Altitude control would vary depending on how much weight it was carrying and its responsiveness to altitude correction.

None of that we know yet.

Just as a SWAG (Sophisticated Wild Ass Guess), I would think that the solar cells could probably power it, but I also wouldn't rule out an auxilliary power source like an RTG.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Zaphod58

I was actually talking about some lesser-known techniques to get data through a jamming signal. Dynamic switching changes frequencies every so often, so even if data is jammed on one frequency, it will still get through when the frequency shifts. For example, the military might read a carrier signal at 900 MHz and set up a jamming signal that centers on 900MHz with a 10MHz bandwidth. But if the data transmission repeats the information signal until a satellite acknowledges it, and if the frequency changes to 800 MHz after five minutes and then back to 900 MHz after another five minutes, the jamming signal will not affect the carrier after the switch. There's a good chance the military will not even pick up on the change unless they are specifically looking for it.

It's a Chinese-built reconnaissance balloon transmitting to/from a Chinese satellite. That opens up a wide range of possibilities when one controls the design of both the sender and receiver.

That's one method of defeating a jammed frequency; there are others, several in fact. I don't know if I am comfortable listing them all here.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

Most modern military radios are frequency agile. It's a well known technique. The trick is to find the frequencies used, and how often it jumps. You can't block all the information, but you can block a range of commonly used frequencies, until you can get a feel for how often it changes, and to what frequencies. That's one of the missions of the Rivet Joint, and the U-2, both of which were used to track this across the US. I'll guarantee that they got some information, but we were almost certainly able to limit what they got. Especially if it's an ELINT package as it appears.

a reply to: Mantiss2021

Not really a regulation as much a matter of common sense; you want the envelope to shred as a way to minimize the possibility of having the deflated cell get tangled up in your payload, causing an uncontrolled descent.

That's Western thinking. China is not a Western country. They do not care about our convenience or what kind of mess they make over our country.

What does it matter to them if the payload is downed? It's just a shorter mission, and the apparatus wasn't intended to be reused anyway. They surely had some method of wiping the actual data should it drop altitude over a certain rate. We could get some information from things like antenna design, but the actual secrets are probably buried inside a computer chip. The possibility that we could forensically "decode" a computer chip design is pretty low. It's actually next to impossible. If there are memory banks to hold queued data, they can be erased automatically.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Zaphod58

And if they simultaneously transmit on two different frequencies and rotate through, say 16? What if the secondary signal is only used after a missed acknowledgement on the primary?

We're really not talking about a tremendous amount of data being necessary. A few hours of data could likely be transmitted in minutes (perhaps seconds). So even if the military did get the timing and both frequencies, would they be able to adjust the jamming signal before a few seconds had elapsed?

One of my present projects I am playing with is a robotic force based on group intelligence, intended as military reconnaissance, deep space exploration, and disaster recovery. One problem I came across early in the design was what to do if the signal lock was interrupted (whether intentionally or via natural phenomena). It turns out that such a problem is easily corrected as long as one has access to both transmitter and receiver.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

They have the capability to jam more than one frequency at a time. The RC-135 can detect and time the frequency hopping, then multiple other platforms can jam whatever is necessary to jam. In the meantime, minimize electronic signals on the ground underneath where the balloon is travelling so you minimize what it's collecting.

The US uses a system called CCS, or Counter Communications System. It's a ground based, mobile jammer that jams SATCOM. Block 10.2 was declared operational in March 2020. It's believed it jams C, Ku, and X-band frequencies from the ground. There's a new upgrade called Meadowlands that's being developed since 2021, and is expected to see contract completion by Feb of next year. Meadowlands will reduce the size of CCS 10.2, and provide more capabilities.

As I said, there's no way to guarantee that they didn't get something, but there are multiple steps that can, and almost certainly were taken to limit what they could get, and send back.

a reply to: TheRedneck

At least two possibilities:

One. They did intend to recover the payload, somehow. The balloon would be cut away, likely by a pyrotechnic device that would result in a shred, while the payload descends on a chute. This is how we would do it...So I strongly doubt that this is what the Chinese would have done.

But if they really did not want the electronics to be potentially recovered, in case of a "misadventure", wouldn't they have included a "fail safe" option that would have blown the whole rig to pieces, while it was still at altitude to insuring the widest possible dispersal of the debris?

Wiping the memory would have required power. And under the conditions that balloon would have encountered, a loss of power could have occurred at virtually any point along its path.

But the "fail safe" option, if there was one, should have been triggered when that missile popped the balloon.

Yet there was no secondary explosion....or even really a primary one.


Option Two:

There was no persistent memory on board. Everything gathered during its operation was transmitted directly to a sheparding satellite(s) synchronized to the airships' arrival within sensor proximity to a designated target location: Store/Forward, but without the "Store".

Remember, what made this balloon different was the fact that it was an airship, capable not only of turning, but also of going forward, backwards, and holding its location...

Perhaps waiting until it's "handler satellite" was within transmission range? The balloon acts as merely a relay.

ETA:

You should have a go at running a time/distance road rally one day.

Dead reckoning is a great mind game.

a reply to: Mantiss2021

I agree they likely dd not expect to recover the payload. It was the size of three city buses, coming down over a country they have just violated the air space of. Recovery would be a pipe dream.

Wiping the memory does not require power... it requires a lack of power. When you unplug your computer, does the RAM hold any data? The operating software could be hard-coded inside a chip... almost impossible to recover.

I seriously doubt this thing had the type of maneuverability you think it does. It could probably turn, adjust altitude, maybe accelerate or decelerate slightly, but stop and back up? That would require a lot more propellers/thrusters than the pictures indicated. You're describing the Hindenberg.

You should have a go at running a time/distance road rally one day.

I possess enough physical ability to run maybe 20 feet. That's not in the cards. I have trouble walking to the end of my driveway and back.

TheRedneck