A Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft that will carry three Expedition 42 crew members to the International Space Station to begin their five-and-a-half-month mission there has been rolled out to its launch pad.
After being mated to its Soyuz-FG booster rocket in the final assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the capsule was moved to the launch pad for its blast-off set for Nov. 23.
Aboard will be Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, NASA Flight Engineer Terry Virts, and Italian Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency.
U.S. Air Force Col. Virts previously flew to the ISS as part of the STS-130 crew aboard Space Shuttle Endeavor.
Shkaplerov, a retired Russian Air Force Colonel, has been in space before on a long-duration mission of 165 days.
For Cristoforetti, an Italian Air Force Captain and the ESA's third woman astronaut, it will be a first journey into space.
The trio will join the first three crew members of Expedition 42 -- NASA's Barry Wilmore and Roscosmos astronauts Elena Serova and Alexander Samoukutyaev -- who arrived at the International Space Station in their Soyuz capsule on Sept. 25.
From launch to arriving at the ISS after four orbits of the earth will take about six hours, followed by docking, after which hatches sill be opened at around 11:30 p.m. on Nov. 23 and the three new Expedition 42 members will join their counterparts.
"The mission that we will be doing on the station is going to be very busy," says Virts. "We are going to be primarily busy with maintaining the station safely, keeping it running."
Expedition 42 would also conducting an aggressive science program, he says, which will see the crew overseeing around 170 experiments for NASA as well as U.S. companies and educational institutions, and a further 70 international science experiments.
"We may end up getting a few spacewalks, if not more it looks like, and, so it's going to be a busy six months," Virts said.
NASA TV will offer video coverage of the pre-launch, launch and ISS docking activities.
Virts, Shkaplerov and Cristoforetti are scheduled to return to Earth in May of 2015.
Read more: Soyuz docks at ISS, delivers 3 astronauts
