Russia launched a spaceship from the Baikonur cosmodrome on Saturday morning to send the eighth expedition to the International Space Station (ISS).

Aboard the Soyuz TMA-3, which took off at 0538 GMT from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, are Alexander Kaleri from Russia, NASA astronaut Michael Foale and Spanish Pedro Duque from the European Space Agency (ESA).

The spacecraft entered orbit about nine minutes after the liftoff and is expected to dock with the ISS on Monday morning.

Telemetric data indicated that all of its systems were functioning as scheduled, according to the Korolyov Ground Control Center outside Moscow.

Kaleri and Foale will work on the orbiting space outpost for 200 days while Duque will spend only 10 days in orbit and return to the Earth aboard another Soyuz on Oct. 28 together with the outgoing crew of Yuri Malenchenko and Edward Lu, who have been working on the ISS since late April.

The new trio will conduct over 20 experiments and make a series of space walks.

It was the second manned space launch by Russia from Baikonur since the US shuttle program has been grounded after the Columbia spaceship disintegrated on February 1, killing all seven crew on board.

The 16-nation floating space hub used to be heavily reliant on US shuttle flights. But after the Columbia disaster, Russian Soyuz crew capsules and Progress cargo ships remain the sole means of transporting to the space station.

The Soyuz TMA-3 is equipped with a special system to monitor the landing process, Itar-Tass quoted a senior designer with the Russian aerospace group Energiya as reporting.

The system will help to avoid a ballistic descent during the landing operation similar to what happened on May 4, when the former ISS crew was landing.

The Russian-American trio managed to land on the ground but on a ballistic trajectory. Their spaceship deviated about 400 kilometers from the target site and it took rescuers a long time to find it.

Earlier reports said that the back-up crew, comprising Valery Tokarev, William MacArthur and ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers from Holland, is expected to fly to the ISS in April 2004, according to the Russian Space Agency.

(Xinhua News Agency October 18, 2003)