International Space Station Welcomes New Crew [VIDEO]

The International Space Station (ISS) welcomed a new crew early Thursday morning, bringing the total number of people aboard the orbiting lab to a crowded nine.

Expedition 38 entered the station just before 8:00 a.m. EST, having docked roughly two and a half hours earlier. The trio, which included Mikhail Tyurin, Koichi Wakata and Rick Mastracchio, launched into space aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule shortly before midnight the previous night from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The arrival of the new trio marks the first time since October 2009 that nine people have occupied the station in the absence of a space shuttle. The moment is to be short lived, however, with Expedition 37's Fyodor Yurchikhin, Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano scheduled to say their goodbyes in just a few days, ending their five and a half month stay in space.

The newest additions are scheduled to remain at the space station until May 2014.

Around 9:00 a.m. on Nov. 8, all nine gathered together to hold a joint crew news conference in which they talked about the upcoming 15th anniversary of the space station's construction. They also discussed Nov. 9's spacewalk in which Russian crewmembers Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy will carry the Olympic torch outside the station as part of its relay leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

Though the torch has been in space twice before -- once in 1996 and again in 2000 -- the upcoming event will mark its first-ever spacewalk.

"Our goal here is to make it look spectacular," Kotov told reporters before his mission began, according to Reuters. "We'd like to showcase our Olympic torch in space ... Millions of people will see it live on TV and they will see the station and see how we work."