WASHINGTON: The US announced on Friday that it had completed recovery efforts off the coast of South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a US fighter jet on February 4 and that investigators are now analyzing its "guts."

However, authorities in the United States and Canada announced that they had suspended their search for three unidentified objects shot down over the weekend after failing to find any debris.

President Joe Biden stated this week that the other three objects were most likely balloons associated with private companies, recreation, or research institutions, rather than China's spy program.

The last of the debris from the Chinese balloon, which was brought down by a Sidewinder missile, is being sent to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, according to the United States military's Northern Command.

The recovery efforts for the suspected Chinese spy balloon, which were halted on Thursday, were first reported by Reuters.

"There is a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and optics, and all of that is now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said.

Kirby stated that the US had already learned a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the country.

"We believe we'll learn even more by looking at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of," he said at a White House press briefing.

The Navy and Coast Guard vessels that had been scouring the sea for nearly two weeks have left the area, according to the US military.

"The air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted," Northern Command announced in a statement.

The US military believes it has collected all of the Chinese balloon's priority sensors and electronics, as well as large sections of its structure, which could aid counterintelligence officials in determining how Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance data.

The balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy vessel, flew over the United States and Canada for a week before being shot down off the coast of North Carolina on Biden's orders.

The incident sparked outrage in Washington and prompted the US military to search the skies for other objects that were not being detected by radar. Between last Friday and Sunday, Northern Command conducted three unidentified "object" shootdowns, an unprecedented number.

It announced late Friday that the search for the two objects shot down in US airspace - one over Alaska and the other over Lake Huron - had ended, with "no debris discovered."

"The United States military, federal agencies, and Canadian partners conducted systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans," it said.

The third object was shot down over the Canadian territory of Yukon. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement on Friday that it, too, had decided to call off the search.

"Given the snowfall that has occurred, the decreasing likelihood that the object will be found, and the current belief that the object is not tied to a scenario that justifies extraordinary search efforts," the RCMP said in a statement.

The Chinese balloon incident forced US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a planned visit to Beijing later this month, further straining relations between Washington and Beijing.

That Blinken trip would have been the first by a US secretary of state to China in five years, and both sides saw it as an opportunity to repair increasingly strained relations.

Since then, US officials have been considering a meeting between Blinken and China's top diplomat, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, which began on Friday.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who is attending the conference in Munich, defended the administration's handling of the balloon incident as well as the shooting down of the three other objects.

The Chinese balloon "needed to be shot down because we were confident that China was using it to spy on American citizens," Harris told MSNBC.

"We will maintain our perspective on what the relationship between China and the United States should be," she said. "That isn't going to change, but that balloon was definitely not helpful."