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This is the first time since October 2009 that nine people will be aboard the space station at the same time without a space shuttle present. The crew members are together for only four days as one expedition ends and another begins.
The nine crew members represent three space station expeditions:
• Expedition 36/37: Karen Nyberg of NASA, Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency;
• Expedition 37/38: Michael Hopkins of NASA and Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy of Roscosmos; and
• Expedition 37/38/39: Rick Mastracchio of NASA, Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos.
The joint news conference, which was arranged in coordination with NASA's international partner agencies, will last 40 minutes and will feature questions from U.S., Russian, European and Japanese media. Each partner agency will have 10 minutes for questions. Because of the limited time available, all U.S. media will be required to ask their questions via a phone bridge managed at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. To use the phone bridge, journalists must call Johnson's newsroom at 281-483-5111 by 8:30 a.m. EST Nov. 8.
Topics for discussion include the upcoming 15th anniversary of space station construction, the crew members' support for research inside the orbiting laboratory, and plans for a Nov. 9 spacewalk with the Olympic torch that will light the flame at the opening of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.
Mastracchio, Tyurin and Wakata will launch aboard a Soyuz rocket Nov. 6 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with the torch stowed aboard and dock their Soyuz capsule to the space station that same day, bringing the onboard complement to nine.
Kotov and Ryazanskiy will venture outside the space station with the torch as part of a 6-hour spacewalk before the torch's scheduled Nov. 10 return to Earth with Nyberg, Yurchikhin and Parmitano.
