The Chinese spy balloon incident in early 2023 raised important concerns about the ability of the United States to detect airborne threats.
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| Credit: Department of Defense photo |
Early in 2023, the Chinese spy balloon incident caused serious concerns about the United States' capacity to identify aerial threats.
The United States of America and Canada's airspace are protected by the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), a binational organisation. In an exclusive interview with NBC News on July 20, 2023, its commander, General Glen VanHerck, disclosed that the Chinese spy balloon incident spurred the creation of new surveillance equipment to bolster American monitoring capabilities.
“We were not looking for a high-altitude balloon at that time — 65,000 feet, very slow. Our radars are capable of seeing it, but we were filtering out that data,” VanHerck told NBC News. “We funded Over-the-horizon radar capabilities which allow [NORAD] to see further away. The question is what do you do with that data and information,” VanHerck continued. “We need to feed that into a globally integrated air and missile defense capability.”
Over-the-horizon radars (OTH) are a class of radar system made to find and follow things at extremely long distances that are out of the radar's line of view.
Due of the Earth's curvature and obstructions like mountains and buildings, conventional radars are only able to identify targets that are directly in their line of sight. Over-the-horizon radars, on the other hand, utilise a phenomena known as "skywave propagation" or "ionospheric reflection" to increase their detection range.
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