NASA Astronaut Mike Hopkins Available for Interviews before Space Mission

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Aug 30, 2013, 10:45 ET

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, scheduled to travel to the International Space Station in September, will be available for live satellite interviews from 7-8 a.m. EDT Monday, Sept. 9.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)

Hopkins will answer questions from news media representatives via satellite from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, where he is making final preparations for a Sept. 25 launch. Before the interviews, NASA Television will air footage of Hopkins' mission training, beginning at 6:30 a.m.

Reporters who would like to participate in the interviews should contact Seth Marcantel at [email protected] or 281-792-7515 no later than 3 p.m. Friday, Sept. 6.

Selected for the astronaut corps in 2009, Hopkins holds bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., respectively. He is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force.

An advocate of lifelong fitness, Hopkins encourages the public to follow his mission preparations through the "Train Like an Astronaut" program. He shares his workouts and fitness demonstrations through social media and plans to continue doing this throughout his spaceflight.

Hopkins will launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft at 4:58 p.m. Sept. 25 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He will travel to the space station with crewmates Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos).

When the Soyuz arrives at the orbiting outpost, the crew will join Expedition 37 Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of Roscosmos, Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency.

The crew members will assist in several hundred experiments that cross the fields of biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science during their mission, which will last nearly six months. Hopkins, Kotov and Ryazanskiy are scheduled to return to Earth in March 2014.

For Hopkins' complete biography, visit:

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/hopkins-ms.html

Follow Hopkins and other NASA astronauts via Twitter at:

@AstroILLINI

and

@NASA_Astronauts

For more information about Expeditions 37 and 38, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/15jN1Ze

For more information about the "Train Like an Astronaut" program, visit:

http://www.Facebook.com/TrainAstronaut

For more information about the International Space Station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station