Spy balloon difficult to shoot down, says expert

WASHINGTON: The first Chinese surveillance balloon that the Pentagon found flying over sensitive US ballistic missile sites may be guided by advanced artificial intelligence technology, a US expert said.

A second Chinese surveillance balloon was later spotted over Latin America, the Pentagon said, without specifying its exact location.

William Kim, a specialist in surveillance balloons at the Marathon Initiative think tank in Washington, told AFP that balloons are a valuable means of observation that are difficult to shoot down.

Kim said the first Chinese balloon looked like a normal weather balloon but with distinct characteristics.

It has a quite large, visible “payload” — the electronics for guidance and collecting information, powered by large solar panels.

And it appears to have advanced steering technologies that the US military hasn’t yet put in the air.

Artificial intelligence has made it possible for a balloon, just by reading the changes in the air around it, to adjust its altitude to guide it where it wants to go, Kim said.

“What’s happened very recently with advances in AI is that you can have a balloon that... doesn’t need its own motion system. Merely by adjusting the altitude it can control its direction.”

That could also involve radio communications from its home base, he said.

But “if the point of it is to monitor (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos, which is one of the theories... you wouldn’t necessarily need to tell it to adjust its location,” he added.

Kim said that as satellites become more vulnerable to being attacked from the Earth and space, balloons have distinct advantages.

Firstly, they don’t easily show up on radars.

“These are materials that don’t reflect, they’re not metal. So even though these balloons expand to quite large, detecting... the balloon itself is going to be a problem,” he said.

Kim called it a “real possibility” that a Chinese balloon may have been intended to collect data from outside US boundaries or much higher but malfunctioned.

“These balloons don’t always work perfectly,” he said.

Shooting down a balloon is not as easy as it sounds, said Kim. “These balloons use helium... It’s not the Hindenburg, you can’t just shoot it and then it goes up in flames.” “

If you do punch holes in it, it’s just kind of going to leak out very slowly.”

AP The suspected spy balloon over Montana on Wednesday.