By Adam Mann

While many in the US today are focused on a terrestrial contest pitting two teams against one another, engineers at NASA are concentrating on a pair of orbiting satellites working in tandem. Around the time of tonight’s Superbowl halftime show (about 01:00 hours GMT), the two Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft will be aligned on exactly opposite sides of the Sun, giving researchers their first simultaneous 360-degree view of our parent star.

“Nothing can hide from us anymore,” says Joseph Gurman, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and project scientist on the STEREO mission. The wraparound coverage allows researchers to see violent eruptions emanating from the Sun’s surface that they might otherwise miss, he adds.

Researchers have just released a close-to-full view of the entire sun obtained on 2 February. This 2D image is, of course, only half of what there is to see (one quarter of the Sun from each of the two spacecraft). You can watch STEREO’s full 3D fly-around version of this view here.

Launched in 2006, the STEREO satellites orbit the Sun at a distance similar to the Earth, though one is slightly farther and the other slightly closer in. Basic orbital mechanics means that the satellite with the shorter orbital radius has been steadily gaining on Earth while its partner has been trailing behind at the same rate. This has now put them on opposite sides of the Sun, giving scientists a more complete view of solar activity, says Gurman.

Working with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a probe launched in February 2010 that takes a high-resolution image of the Sun every three-quarters of a second, the STEREO spacecraft can observe coronal mass ejections, which spew fast-moving streams of ionized particles into space. When they blow past Earth these particles can disrupt our planet’s magnetic field, potentially endangering satellites in orbit and overloading electrical grids on the ground.

Often, these discharges are not confined to a single point on the solar surface.

“We have witnessed large eruptions and flares on one part of the Sun that can be intimately related to activity half a globe away,” says Richard Harrison, an astronomer at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and principal investigator for the UK instruments on STEREO.

Because the Sun is rotating, solar disturbances that ultimately affect Earth may begin hidden from view. STEREO’s ability to reveal the Sun’s far side can help researchers better gauge the possible effects of solar weather, says Gurman.