hello and welcome. coming to you live from studio 4 at the cnn center in atlanta, i m michael holmes. appreciate your company. coming up on cnn newsroom i ordered the pentagon to shoot it down on wednesday as soon as possible. the u.s. has shot down a suspected chinese spy balloon after it traveled across america for days. recovery efforts now under way. china says the balloon entered u.s. air space by accident, heightening already tense relations between washington and beijing. live in hong kong with the latest from there. it s not the only one. the pentagon says a second balloon is flying over latin america. a report ahead. live from cnn center, this is cnn newsroom with michael holmes. we br to show you the dramatic moment a u.s. sidewinder missile took out the suspected chinese spy balloon that has caused so much havoc this week. the balloon was so high up, nearly 12 miles or 20 kilometers, that it took a few seconds for the shockwave to reach the grou
About 27,500 kilometers per hour, moving very fast. which means its dwell time, its ability to be over a particular target, is very short. the balloon is at 60,000 feet drifting with the wind. so it can actually spend a long time over a particular region. and with signals intelligence and electronic intelligence, sigent and elent, it s about scooping up emissions, transmissions, everything that could be happening electronically in the air around those sensitive u.s. military sites, including significant numbers of nuclear missile icbm silos. so this is an important area for the u.s. military. that chinese balloon would have been gathering intelligence on sigent and elent emissions, and it would be a useful way for that intelligence to then be sent back via satellite to the chinese. yeah, yeah. and it s going to be interesting.