It is more often seen on rubbish tips and compost heaps, but things were looking up for the Caenorhabditis elegans worm last night.

After more than a year of preparatory work, scientists from the University of Nottingham handed over more than 4,000 of the minuscule creatures for boarding on the space shuttle Atlantis before tonight’s launch from Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The British wormonauts will spend 11 days in orbit more than 200 miles above the Earth, travelling 4.5 million miles, as part of a study that is expected to have important implications for future human space travellers.

Known to scientists simply as C. Elegans, the species shares as much as 80 per cent of its genetic material with humans. Such similarities make it a reasonable laboratory model for research into human physiology and, on this mission, for studies into the muscle-wasting effects of space travel.

Muscles do not have to work against gravity while in space, so they become weak. With astronauts destined to spend years at a time off the planet manning long-term missions to destinations such as the Moon and Mars, scientists are keen to establish how such degradation might be prevented.

“There’s a reasonable amount of variability in the muscle mass that’s lost due to space flight, with some losing 50 per cent, though on average it’s 5 to 15 per cent,” said Nathaniel Szewczyk, of the university’s Institute for Clinical Research, as he prepared the worms to check in.

“We need to figure out how we can deal with some of the medical problems associated with space flight, how do we deal with muscle atrophy and radiation? That’s what these worms will be helping us to do.”

The worms will be exposed to a drug that has been approved recently for use in preventing muscle wastage among cancer patients. The study is likely to pave the way for testing the drug on astronauts during future missions. The worms, measuring a millimetre (0.04in), are descended from a batch that was harvested 50 years ago from mushroom compost in Bristol. Some of their relatives survived the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, falling 43 miles to Earth inside aluminium canisters.

The worms, contained within special bags, have been placed in a dormant state for the launch and will be frozen for their return to preserve their tissues.

They will be joined aboard Atlantis by a colony of painted lady butterfly larvae, which are the subjects of a separate experiment, and six astronauts whose key task is to deliver 15 tons of equipment to the International Space Station.

Nasa considers research into the physiological effects of weightlessness crucial to its plans for the exploration of space.

Dr Szewczyk said that although some people may think it was a bizarre explanation for research, aspects of muscle atrophy could not be studied or replicated easily on Earth.

He said: “From the videos we have of these guys [worms] in the past, they don’t seem particularly fussed about being weightless at all.”

Small leaps

— The first creatures in space were fruit flies that were blasted to an altitude of 106 miles in 1947 before being parachuted back to Earth

— In 2007 an experiment by the European Space Agency found that tiny invertebrates called tardigrades, or “water bears”, could survive in the vacuum of space, withstanding the low pressure and intense radiation

— In 2007 a spider caused alarm at Cape Canaveral when its magnified image crawled across the lens of a Nasa camera, appearing to take a bite out of the space shuttle

Sources: Nasa, European Space Agency and Times database

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