HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — For 25 years, a team in Huntsville has been helping keep the International Space Station running around the clock, supporting thousands of scientific experiments that have advanced our understanding of everything from space travel to life on Earth.
Since March 19, 2001, the Payload Operations Integration Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has overseen 24/7 operations, helping astronauts carry out more than 4,000 investigations aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Some highlights include the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer collecting over 260 billion cosmic rays, the Cold Atom Lab reaching temperatures just fractions of a degree above absolute zero, and astronauts growing more than 50 types of plants aboard the station. The NASA Rodent Research Program has also completed 21 missions in 11 years to study health and physiology for Earth and space applications…