UPDATED 12:40 p.m. ET to include details of the docking.
Three new crewmembers -- including British astronaut Tim Peake -- have arrived at the International Space Station after blasting off from Kazakhstan on Tuesday morning.
The new batch of Space Station residents, including Peake, NASA’s Tim Kopra and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko will live and work on the station for about six months, performing biological and other experiments during their time in the space laboratory.
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Peake, in particular, has garnered a fair bit of attention recently as the first British national to fly to space as a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut.
#Soyuz ~100 meters away from @Space_Station waiting for docking plan from Russian Mission Control. pic.twitter.com/GfZNX0wnGa— Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) December 15, 2015
“Tim is a fantastic astronaut,” Libby Jackson, Astronaut Flight Education Programme Manager for the UK Space Agency, told Mashable. “He is very friendly, very calm, very cool, he thinks things through logically but does that with a smile on his face.”
Peake is also planning to run the London Marathon while in space as other runners jog the 26.2 miles on Earth.
“I have to wear a harness system that’s a bit similar to a rucksack. It has a waistbelt and shoulder straps. That has to provide quite a bit of downforce to get my body onto the treadmill so after about 40 minutes, that gets very uncomfortable," Peake said in a press release from the ESA. "I don’t think I’ll be setting any personal bests."
Now that's a good looking rocket! #Principia https://t.co/y6l00YyOFo— Tim Peake (@astro_timpeake) December 13, 2015
Peake, Kopra and Malenchenko launched in their Russian-made Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 6:03 a.m. ET Tuesday (5:03 p.m. GMT in Kazakhstan).
The three space explorers docked with the station at 12:33 p.m. ET (5:33 p.m. GMT) Tuesday, just a little bit more than six hours after launch.
Contact! #Soyuz docking confirmed at 12:33pm EST/5:33pm UTC while flying over India. pic.twitter.com/SIxLHQ8bN1— Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) December 15, 2015
For reference, it takes longer to fly from New York to San Francisco than it does for a Soyuz to get to the Space Station -- located 250 miles above Earth -- using this expedited flight profile.
The three crewmembers join NASA's Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov onboard the space lab. Kelly and Kornienko are both taking part in the station's first one-year mission and are expected to return to Earth in March 2016.