Investigating the Air India Flight AI 2379 Technical Anomaly
New reports indicate a cascade of hydraulic failures, rather than turbulence, caused a sudden altitude drop on an Air India flight.
By LNGFRM Team
Published August 10, 2026
The cosmos, in its grand design, often keeps its most spectacular secrets under wraps, revealing them only through rare celestial alignments.
Total solar eclipses, those fleeting moments when the moon perfectly obscures the sun, have long been humanity’s only window into the sun’s ethereal outer atmosphere, the corona. Why Study Solar Eclipses?
These breathtaking events, occurring on average just once every 16 months somewhere on Earth, or a mere once every 366 years for any specific locale, have always demanded patience, travel, and a healthy dose of luck.
But now, the European Space Agency (ESA) has changed the game, debuting the first images from a revolutionary mission that promises to create its own eclipses, on demand, opening an unprecedented era of solar discovery.
Meet Proba-3, ESA’s audacious “eclipse machine,” a decade in the making and a testament to human ingenuity.
Launched aboard an Indian PSLV-XL rocket in December 2024, this pioneering mission is the world’s first to deploy two satellites in such precise formation that one effectively becomes an artificial moon for the other.
The “occulter” satellite, a mere 4.4 feet across, positions itself with astonishing millimeter accuracy 500 feet away from its companion, the “coronagraph” satellite. How does a coronagraph work?
This intricate dance in space casts a perfect shadow, allowing the coronagraph’s sensitive ASPIICS instrument to peer directly into the sun’s elusive corona, previously only glimpsed during nature’s fleeting spectacles.
The first images, captured during a successful formation flying demonstration on May 23, 2025, are nothing short of breathtaking.
They reveal the sun’s inner corona in vivid green, a striking visual testament to the extreme temperatures found there.
Beyond the sheer aesthetic appeal, these images are a goldmine for solar physicists.
The sun’s surface, the photosphere, registers a relatively cool 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius).
Yet, the corona, its wispy outer atmosphere, blazes at an astonishing two million degrees Fahrenheit (over 1.1 million degrees Celsius) – a staggering 200 times hotter.
This perplexing temperature inversion is one of the sun’s greatest mysteries, and understanding it is crucial, for it is in the corona that the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles that influences space weather, is born. What Is Space Weather and How Does It Affect the Earth?
“As well as being an amazing thing to see, the corona is also a laboratory for plasma physics and the main source of space weather,” explained Andrei Zhukov, Principal Investigator for the ASPIICS instrument, speaking at the Solar Eclipse Conference in Leuven, Belgium.
The implications are profound.
Phenomena like solar wind and coronal mass ejections, powerful bursts of plasma from the sun, can wreak havoc on Earth’s power grids, communication systems, and satellite operations.
Continuous, high-resolution observations of the corona are therefore vital for predicting and mitigating these disruptive events.
Proba-3 has already delivered, capturing not only the superheated coronal green line but also a loop following a solar flare and even a prominence – a relatively cool cloud of plasma often seen during natural eclipses.
“We are very happy to have been able to capture one such structure in one of the first ASPIICS images,” Zhukov enthused.
The challenge of observing the corona has always been its overwhelming brilliance.
The sun’s main disk is a million times brighter than its tenuous atmosphere, making it completely invisible to the naked eye except during a total eclipse.
“They’re inconvenient, they’re rare and last only a few minutes,” Zhukov lamented, noting that Belgium’s last total solar eclipse was in 1406, with the next not until 2090.
This is why space-based coronagraphs are essential.
While ground-based instruments exist, Earth’s atmosphere scatters light, obscuring the crucial inner corona.
Proba-3, by operating in the vacuum of space and with its unprecedented precision, can observe the corona almost to the very edge of the solar surface – a feat previously achievable only during natural eclipses.
“Current coronagraphs are no match for Proba-3,” affirmed Jorge Amaya, Space Weather Modelling Coordinator at ESA.
The engineering behind Proba-3 is a marvel of autonomous navigation.
The Coronagraph and Occulter satellites maintain their critical 150-meter separation with millimeter accuracy, without any ground intervention, for several hours at a time.
This intricate ballet is performed when the satellites are near their apogee – the furthest point in their highly elliptical orbit – where Earth’s gravitational pull, magnetic field, and atmospheric drag are at their weakest, minimizing the need for propellant.
“The precision achieved is extraordinary,” stated Dietmar Pilz, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, highlighting the culmination of years of technological development.
For the scientific community, Proba-3 marks a paradigm shift.
Unlike the ephemeral glimpses offered by natural eclipses, Proba-3 will generate an “artificial eclipse” during each 19.6-hour orbit, accumulating an astounding 1,000 hours of corona images over its two-year mission.
And in a move that underscores the collaborative spirit of scientific discovery, the mission boasts an open data policy, making uncalibrated data immediately available to researchers worldwide.
“Our ‘artificial eclipse’ images are comparable with those taken during a natural eclipse,” Zhukov proudly declared.
While Proba-3’s achievement is groundbreaking, it’s not the first attempt at an artificial eclipse in space.
A joint U.S.-Soviet mission, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, saw the Apollo spacecraft attempt to act as an improvised occulter for Soyuz.
However, that manual effort, hampered by thruster gases scattering light, yielded disappointing results.
Proba-3, with its sophisticated autonomy and dedicated design, has finally brought that concept to fruition.
Will this technological triumph diminish the allure of a natural total solar eclipse?
Absolutely not.
The visceral experience of standing under a darkened sky, feeling the temperature drop, and witnessing the sun’s corona burst into view remains a unique and deeply personal encounter with the cosmos.
But for scientists, Proba-3 is a revolutionary tool, an always-on observatory unlocking the dynamic secrets of our star’s outer atmosphere, promising an unprecedented understanding of the forces that shape space weather and influence our technological world.
The era of the artificial eclipse has dawned, and with it, a new age of solar exploration.
New reports indicate a cascade of hydraulic failures, rather than turbulence, caused a sudden altitude drop on an Air India flight.
Translating foundational models into reliable mobile features requires a rigorous architectural framework that prioritizes safety, grounding, and specialized performance.
Siddhesh Surve is redefining scalable AI infrastructure by combining high-velocity deployment, cost-efficient architecture, and business-aligned engineering discipline. At Meta and across prior roles, he has delivered measurable gains—cutting deployment cycles from 1.5 months to 3 days and reducing cloud costs by up to 40% while increasing processing speed by 30%. His approach signals a future where AI infrastructure is real-time, modular, and self-optimizing—built not just to scale models, but to sustainably power global enterprise growth.
