A Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts left for the International Space Station (ISS) Friday. The crew members are two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut whose arrival on the space station will increase the crew number to six.

The astronauts, NASA veteran Jeff Williams, Roscosmos’ Oleg Skripochka and Aleksey Ovchinin, left the earth at 5:26 pm from Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz space capsule. The trio is expected to reach ISS after a six-hour voyage. As per NASA officials, docking time is 11:11 pm.

Around 12:55 am, two crew members will open the hatches between the space station and the Soyuz capsule. It will allow the new three ISS astronauts to enter the space station and join NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko.

“The Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft [is] now safely in orbit, Jeff Williams, Aleksey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka on board and ready to chase down the International Space Station”, said Dan Huot, a spokesperson for NASA, after the launch event.

With the latest mission, NASA’s 58-year-old astronaut Williams will try to break Scott Kelly's record of 520 days in space. Williams has already spent 362 days in space, and the new mission, scheduled to end in August this year, will take his count to 534 days.

It is the first space mission for Ovchinin, while Skripochka will be aboard the space station for the second time. Williams will stay at the ISS for the fourth time. More than 15 years ago, he visited the station for the first time via the space shuttle Atlantis. That time, the International Space Station was under construction. This time, he will beat Kelly’s record to set the new record of the highest number of cumulative days in space by an American astronaut.