Three astronauts, including the first Brazilian astronaut Marcus Pontes, entered the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday after their Soyuz spaceship docked with the ISS, the Mission Control outside Moscow announced.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-8 carrying Brazilian Marco Pontes, Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and US astronaut Jeffrey Williams docked automatically with the ISS at 8:19 a.m. Moscow time (0419 GMT) on Saturday after hurtling two days in space. And the crew entered the station at 0509 GMT after a brief checking, with Pontes walking in first, carrying his national flag, with a big smile on the face.

Officials from Russia, the U.S. and Brazil gasped breaths at the Mission Control when the ship was slowly docking with the space station and broke into applause when the contact was successfully made.

"Well, gentlemen, I congratulate you," a Mission Control announcer said.

"I am very happy and grateful that everything went so perfectly," a representative of Brazil's space agency, Raimundo Mussi, said

Vinogradov and Williams will replace Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and U.S. astronaut William McArthur, who have been working on the station since October. During their six-month mission, they are expected to make four spacewalks -- two on the Russian program and two on the U.S. program apart from doing some construction and maintenance work -- and conduct about 50 experiments in space.

During their stay, Vinogradov, the mission's commander, will strike a golf ball with a gold-plated club into a four-year Earth orbit, as a tribute to the golf strokes made by NASA astronaut Alan Shepard on the moon in 1971.

Pontes, 43, Brazil's first astronaut in space, will carry out a series of scientific experiments during his nine-day stay on the orbiting lab. He will do some research in the field of nanotechnology and examine Brazil's surface from space, before returning with the outgoing ISS crew on April 9.

He brought a Brazilian national flag and a Brazilian soccer jersey into the station, hoping it would bring his national soccer team good luck in this summer's World Cup in Germany.

The US-Russian crew will welcome another astronaut from Germany, Thomas Reiter, in July, who will be brought to the ISS by US space shuttle Discovery.

The Russian spacecraft have been shouldering the responsibility for shipping crew and supplies to the ISS since NASA grounded its shuttle fleet after the Columbia shuttle explosion in 2003.

Source: Xinhua