HOUSTON — NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn of North Carolina, who is making final preparations for a Dec. 19 launch to the International Space Station, will be available for live satellite interviews from 5 – 6 a.m. CST Tuesday, Dec 4.

The interviews will originate from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia and will be preceded at 4:30 a.m., by a video feed documenting Marshburn’s mission training.

To participate in the interviews, reporters must contact Seth Marcantel at 281-792-7515 no later than 2 p.m. Monday, Dec. 3.

Marshburn is scheduled to launch at 6:12 a.m., on Dec. 19 (6:12 p.m. Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with cosmonaut Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency and astronaut Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency. They will be aboard the station during an exceptionally busy period that includes the arrival of commercial and Russian resupply vehicles, and an increasingly faster pace of scientific research.

A native of Statesville, N.C., Marshburn received an undergraduate degree from Davidson College in North Carolina. He then earned graduate degrees from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, and a doctorate of medicine from Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C. Marshburn served in various roles in emergency medicine and as a NASA flight surgeon before being selected by the agency as an astronaut candidate in 2004.

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.

For NASA Television streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Marshburn’s biography is available at: http://go.nasa.gov/qN0R0e

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