david de roche has a professor at the national defense university. he explains why china may have used a balloon for surveillance. instead of modern drone technology, what it could gather would be higher resolution imagery than you could get from a satellite that lags for a longer period that hovers for longer period over the target. so, you know, you can get a lot of visual information from a satellite, but something as far north, this montana you only have a few seconds of time over the target. whereas a balloon has more time. the 2nd thing a balloon would be capable of doing would be gathering electronic signals, so it could intercept communications. and then finally, because it's in the sovereign airspace of the united states and canada, you would expect it to probably gather information on what kind of signals were using to track it. so we could identify possibly identify in classify, you know, radar hits or something like that. which would be of interest if the chinese wanted to, you know, actually launch an attack and not just the capabilities