From Newsweek:
"It sounds like they shot it down in really just 47 feet of water, which is great, and it probably gave it a bit of a cushion, meaning the payload is probably somewhat intact and what we can do is reverse engineer that and see exactly what their [China's] capabilities are," Walder said.
She continued: "This provides us with a lot of intelligence rather than providing China with the intelligence that they were trying to obtain. My best hypothesis is that this balloon was not taking pictures over the U.S. Rather, they were gathering measurement intelligence, which is signals from nukes, radar, sonar, those kinds of things. That's what it would be measuring, and I'm really hopeful that this will be an intelligence boon for us seeing what this payload has."