WASHINGTON — NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, a Vining, Minn., native who is making final preparations for a launch to the International Space Station, will be available for live satellite interviews from 7- 8 a.m. EDT Thursday, May 9.

The interviews will originate from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. Before they start, NASA Television will air a video b-roll feed at 6:30 a.m., of Nyberg’s mission training and previous spaceflight.

To participate in the interviews, reporters should contact Seth Marcantel at 281-792-7515 no later than 3 p.m. Wednesday, May 8.

Nyberg earned an undergraduate degree from the University of North Dakota and graduate and doctorate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. A mechanical engineer by training, she served in various engineering roles at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston prior to being selected as an astronaut in 2000. Nyberg previously flew in space as a mission specialist aboard space shuttle Discovery on STS-124 in 2008.

Nyberg will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:31 p.m. EDT May 28 aboard a Soyuz spacecraft along with Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency. The trio is scheduled to return to Earth in November.

This launch is the second time in two months a piloted Soyuz spacecraft will have launched and docked to the International Space Station within six hours. When the Soyuz arrives at the station, the crew will join Expedition 36 NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, and Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Pavel Vinogradov, who launched in March. The crew will participate in several hundred experiments that cross the fields of biology and biotechnology, physical science, and earth science during their mission, which will last nearly six months.

NASA TV’s Media Channel 103 will carry the b-roll and will be used to conduct the interviews. It is an MPEG-4 digital C-band signal, carried by QPSK/DVB-S modulation on satellite AMC-18C, transponder 3C, at 105 degrees west longitude, with a downlink frequency of 3760 MHz, vertical polarization, data rate of 38.80 MHz, symbol rate of 28.0681 Mbps, and 3/4 FEC. A Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) is needed for reception. The Compression Format is MPEG-4, Video PID = 0x1031 hex / 4145 decimal, AC-3 Audio PID = 0x1035 hex /4149 decimal, MPEG I Layer II Audio PID = 0x1034 hex /4148 decimal.

Nyberg’s biography is available at: http://go.nasa.gov/np5ICw

Follow Nyberg and other NASA astronauts via Twitter at:

@AstroKarenN and @NASA_Astronauts

For more information about Expedition 36 and 37, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/139pjnN

For information about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station