HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - NASA unveiled a new, upgraded control center in Huntsville Wednesday for science experiments being done on the now-completed International Space Station. America and its partners spent up to $100 billion building the station for research, station manager Mike Suffredini said at the dedication, "and where research is managed is right here at Marshall Space Flight Center.

"So, when you guys see everybody's eyes start to move away from Houston a little bit and start to focus on you," Suffredini said, "that's because this is where it's happening. Over one-third of the total crew hours on ISS are dedicated to research today."

The new Payload Operations Integration Center operates around the clock 365 days a year. Teams of between four and 14 controllers, depending on the hour, communicate with astronauts on the station and scientists around the world with experiments in space. Science has occupied a growing percentage of those astronauts' waking hours, NASA said, including a recent record week with 72 hours of experiments performed. More than 200 experiments are under way on the station at any time.

The public can see the new operations center, because it is one of the stops on the public tours of Marshall that depart from the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.

NASA is using the space station do research in almost every scientific discipline, including medicine, biology, physics and robotics. Vaccines are being developed there, and new cancer treatment delivery systems are being tested. Headline-making findings have been sometimes frustratingly slow in coming, NASA officials acknowledge, because the scientific process of publication and peer review takes time. But they offered one example Wednesday of something new that could only be learned in space.

"About three weeks ago there was a really significant publication from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer," station chief scientist Julie Robinson said. "They've collected over 25 billion observations of galactic cosmic rays ... and, basically, what they've confirmed is that, when you look at the particles in those rays, there's a certain kind of particle there are too many of to have been created by all the processes we understand, which means there's some other process out there." Scientists are now looking at those findings for new understanding of dark matter in the universe.

The control center where these experiments are coordinated is a large, dimly lit room dominated by 22 55--inch LED wall monitors showing everything from the daily calendar to video of the station's interior and maps of its current location above Earth. Stationed at consoles are controllers whose jobs cover everything from experiments to stowage. It is someone's job in Huntsville to know where everything is on the station at any given moment. Colored light panels atop each console identify each position and allow controllers to see at a glance if each station has "gone green" on a procedure.

Marshall has housed the control center since 2001, and it is also the official hurricane season backup for station operations normally controlled in Houston. Work on the renovation started in February, and IT teams worked around the clock to lay nearly three miles of cable and create eight ultra-efficient Ethernet trunks for data transmission.

This story was updated at 4:10 p.m. CDT Wednesday to add a video of the operations center.