A joint team of American and Russian astronauts have set off towards the International Space Station (ISS) by a Russian Soyuz rocket.
The Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft left the Earth from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 21:26 GMT on Friday and took with it American astronaut Jeff Williams from NASA and Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka both from Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to ISS as the Expedition 47-48.
The trio is scheduled to reach the station nearly six hours after the liftoff and will join the Expedition 47 crew members Yuri Malenchenko from Russia, Tim Kopra from the US and Tim Peake from Britain.
The team are going to spend 177 days at the ISS and are to replace Scott Kelly from the US and Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov from Russia, who left the station and landed on the Earth on March 1.
The ISS, as an off-the-Earth laboratory, is where astronauts conduct experiments in various fields, such as biology, biotechnology, physics, astronomy and meteorology and Earth sciences.
The ISS, which maintains an orbit with an altitude of between 330 and 435 kilometers (205 and 270 miles), has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000, setting a record for the longest continuous human presence in space.
This makes it easy to access the Press TV website