The three newest members of Expedition 42 docked safely at the International Space Station on Monday, bringing to six the total number of astronauts now aboard the ISS.

Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos, Terry Virts of NASA and Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency, who were flown to the ISS by Russia's Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft, joined Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyayev and Yelena Serova, and NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore on board the ISS.

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Cristoforetti is the first Italian woman to journey into space. She and her two other compatriots will stay on the station for six months.

The Soyuz automatically docked with the ISS at 0248 GMT. The hatches between the spacecraft and the space station opened at 0500 GMT.

The sic-person crew will perform an extensive program of tests and experiments, and carry out missions with the Russian cargo spacecraft Progress and the European cargo spaceship ATV-5.

The Soyuz blasted-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan on Sunday. Before take-off, the three new crew members appeared relaxed in the cramped cockpit while monitoring cockpit displays and providing status reports to flight controllers, CBS News reported.

"Everything's fine on board, everything's nominal," said Shkaplerov, Soyuz TMA-15M commander.

The spacecraft was launched at 4:01:00 PM EST and it arrived on the orbit at 4:25 PM EST.

"We're going to be primarily focused on maintaining the station safely, keeping it running and leaving it a better place than when we arrived," Virts said.

"But of course, the mission of the space station is science, and we have a very aggressive science program, roughly 170 U.S.-based experiments, NASA and U.S. companies and private educational institutions, and over 70 other international experiments. So there's a lot of science we'll be doing," Virts added.

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