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Comment by riku_iki | Hacker News Reader

electronics is damaged by water likely, it could have more chance to survive if hit the ground.

Water alone does not damage electronics - the electricity that flows through the water does, causing electrolysis. Most of the time the damage is also concentrated on the power delivery which tends to be trivial to repair. If the a higher voltage line (say 12V, 3.3V, etc) bridges to a dataline (around ~1V), it can fry ICs, though. For analysis even fried chips would be good enough.

They would not be concerned about the electronics being damaged so much as recoverable so the components used can be analyzed and the supply chains traced. They want to know whether any export-restricted gear was used and, if so, who is to blame.

Don’t they already manufacture all our export restricted tech? /s

Jokes aside, I think the analysis will be more angled to proving or disproving the purpose, and identifying intelligence it gathered through some forensic analysis. If it dips into salty water, all circuit boards are immediately shorted. Seems a bit counter productive to me.

Most space and aviation type stuff has conformal coating which should essentially make the boards themselves waterproof.

Of course things can still get shorted and damaged at the connectors, but the whole thing wouldn't be destroyed by water.

They may want to analyze the cryptographic comms. Having working electronics might make that easier.

You can always dry things out. Hitting the ground is harder than hitting water, and it really depends on how they took out the balloon (if they were able to hit it with a small puncture, the balloon would come down more softly, but guns don’t really go to 60k, so it was probably a missile right?

You can dry things out, but seawater is really corrosive. After several hours or days spent in such environment, I wouldn't bet on any normal electronics working.

SpaceX experimented with catching spent fairings above water precisely because they wanted to avoid any contact between seawater and internal electronics of the fairing. At the end of the day, they reinforced the fairings electronics against water intrusion (AFAIK?) and this proved to be more economical than catching the fairings with a net, but Chinese airborne spying devices are unlikely to be as hardened against seawater intrusion as SpaceX fairings.

Try to make small puncture in pressured baloon and report your findings here, you might be surprised.

An F22 won't make a small puncture (in fact the video shows the balloon exploding). Water becomes very quickly a hard surface at speed.

You can see video of the impact- it looks like the missile hit the payload, not the balloon, and spattered it. In light of comments about self destruct, this may have been an effort to disrupt mechanisms that would have completely incinerated sensitive material by instead breaking the sensitive material into pieces

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