NASA Astronaut Available For Interviews Before Station Flight

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Jun 19, 2012, 06:57 ET

HOUSTON, June 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, making final preparations for a July launch to the International Space Station, will be available for live satellite interviews from 6 to 7 a.m. CDT Tuesday, June 26. The interviews will originate from Moscow and will be preceded at 5:30 a.m. by a feed of video documenting Williams' mission training.

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Williams, a record-setting astronaut who lived and worked aboard the space station for six months in 2006, will be a flight engineer on the station's Expedition 32 crew. She will become commander of Expedition 33. Williams is scheduled to launch at 9:40 p.m. CDT July 14 (8:40 a.m. July 15 Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Flight Engineers Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Williams is a native of Needham, Mass., and a 1987 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. After earning her commission, Williams served in various roles as a Navy officer before being selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in 1998. She received a master's degree from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1995.

Williams and her colleagues will be aboard the station during an exceptionally busy period that includes two spacewalks, the arrival of Japanese, U.S. commercial and Russian resupply vehicles and an increasingly faster pace of scientific research.

To arrange an interview, news media representatives must contact Karen Svetaka at 281-483-8684 or [email protected] by 2 p.m. Monday, June 25.

The NASA Live Interview Media Service (LIMS) satellite will be used for the interviews. LIMS satellite parameters will be provided by NASA to confirmed clients closer to the event.

For NASA Television streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For Williams' complete biography, visit:

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/williams-s.html

For more information about the International Space Station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

SOURCE NASA