High Res Image of the Balloon [Tweet] | Hacker News Reader

High Res Image of the Balloon [Tweet]

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37 pointsElement_7 comments

My favorite part of this photo is that the pilot captured the shadow of his own U-2 on the surface of the balloon. Here is the full image[0], and it was verified by the Pentagon.

[0] https://d3lcr32v2pp4l1.cloudfront.net/Pictures/780xany/5/2/3...

This tweet is a meme. I would suggest changing the article to Bloomberg or CNN’s coverage.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/spy-plane... - Spy Plane Pilot Takes Selfie With China Balloon at 60,000 Feet

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/22/politics/pentagon-china-ballo...

Bloomberg https://archive.ph/ErVJy

The apparent propellers on it are interesting. I was under the impression the claim was an unpowered balloon just steered using vertical motion to get in the right air currents.

The Drive has a link to a similar balloon spotted over Japan several years ago but without the large solar array, presumably to help power the motors? Or just to provide longer term power for a longer flight.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/our-best-look-yet-at-t...

Steering with just vertical motion alone won't work unpowered as well? At that size the pump has quite something to do, and needs to be temperated.

Here is a nice article from analysis, prior art, to some guesses about lot more details, just need your favorite translation tool: https://steadyhq.com/en/realitatsabzweig/posts/90669d9f-e2f2...

Power is needed for the pump to go up and down, eventual rudder/rotors, to keep hardware warm enough (!), and also large array because in contrast to Loon no transparent material but very reflective one, which has advantages but comes with more self-shading (counter with larger array). Also btw, propellers were present also on the later Loons already..

So the pilot had a phone in the plane and made a selfie? Or is it just one of the many cameras in the plane and they decided to release just this one because it looks cool (and probably doesn't give away too much of the plane's capabilities)?

A claim of geolocation: https://twitter.com/obretix/status/1628511189582942209?cxt=H...

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