WASHINGTON - The United States has ended its search for debris from an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon it shot down earlier this month, as well as two other objects downed near Alaska and on Lake Huron respectively, the military’s Northern Command (USNorthCom) said on Friday.

Washington said it had collected sensors and other debris from the Chinese balloon shot down by a US fighter jet on Feb 4, and investigators are now analysing its “guts”.

“Recovery operations concluded on Feb 16 off the coast of South Carolina, after US Navy assets assigned to US Northern Command successfully located and retrieved debris from the high-altitude PRC surveillance balloon,” USNorthCom said in a statement, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

The last pieces of debris from the Chinese balloon, which was downed by a Sidewinder missile, are heading to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, the USNorthCom added.

Reuters was first to report the conclusion of the recovery efforts, which were halted on Thursday.

“It’s a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure and some of the electronics and the optics. All that is now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

Mr Kirby said the United States had already learnt a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the US.

“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,” he told a White House news briefing.

The US military said Navy and Coast Guard vessels that had been scouring the sea for nearly two weeks have left the area.

“Air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted,” USNorthCom said in a statement.

The US military has said it believes it has collected all the priority sensors and electronics from the Chinese balloon, as well as large sections of its structure, and these could help counter-intelligence officials determine how Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance information.

Late on Friday, USNorthCom announced that it was ending searches for two other objects that were shot down – one off Alaska’s northern coast on Feb 10 and the other over Lake Huron on Feb 12.

“The US military, federal agencies, and Canadian partners conducted systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, and did not locate debris,” the statement said.

The Chinese balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy vessel, spent a week flying over the US and Canada before being shot down off the Atlantic Coast on orders from President Joe Biden.

The episode caused an uproar in Washington and led the US military to search the skies for other objects that were not being captured on radar. The military’s Northern Command carried out an unprecedented three shoot-downs of unidentified “objects” between last Friday and Sunday.

But Mr Biden’s administration sought on Friday to temper expectations about recovery efforts for those three objects, which fell over challenging terrain and, in one case, the very deep waters of Lake Huron.

“We all have to accept the possibility that we may not be able to recover it,” Mr Kirby said, noting it would be difficult to identify those objects without finding debris.

The Chinese balloon incident also prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing earlier this month and has further strained already frayed ties between China and the US.

The Blinken trip to China would have been the first by a US Secretary of State in five years, and was seen by both sides as an opportunity to stabilise increasingly fraught ties.

US officials have since been looking at the possibility of a meeting between Mr Blinken and China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference that began on Friday.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris, who is also in Munich for the conference, has defended the administration’s handling of the balloon incident and the shooting down of the three other objects.

The Chinese balloon “needed to be shot down because we were confident that it was used by China to spy on the American people,” Ms Harris told news network MSNBC.

“We will maintain the perspective that we have in terms of what should be the relationship between China and the United States,” she said. “That is not going to change, but surely and certainly that balloon was not helpful.” REUTERS