This week, it emerged that a computer worm had crawled its way into a laptop on the International Space Station.

Fortunately, the virus did not harm any of the station's command and control systems, and crew members updated the antivirus software on the onboard laptops.

But this is far from the first computer-related glitch that has occurred in space. New Scientist highlights a few of the more prominent - and messy - failures of the past.

Floating globules

In space, everything floats - a fact that was made abundantly clear on the Gemini 7 mission, in which a pair of astronauts spent two weeks in Earth orbit in 1965.

During the mission, a bag of urine burst - scattering globules that threatened to short out spacecraft hardware. Now NASA shields all its hardware in an epoxy coating.

Software glitches have also plagued robotic space missions. One early incident involved the Mariner 1 probe, which was intended to fly past Venus but was destroyed 5 minutes after launch on 22 July 1962, when its navigation software malfunctioned.

The problem was later discovered to be a missing hyphen in the probe's computer code. "I've met the guy who created that code," says Paul Ceruzzi of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. "He carries a New York Times article about that hyphen around in his wallet."

Different units

A similar, head-slapping coding error led to the loss of the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. NASA failed to convert Imperial units to metric, and investigators believe that left the probe 100 kilometres too close to Mars when it tried to enter orbit.

To deal with software issues, NASA builds in redundant computers in case one fails - but sometimes this doesn't work. In June 2007, the International Space Station almost had to be evacuated when all six of its Russian control computers - which regulate onboard oxygen and water supplies - shut down simultaneously. Fortunately, they were brought back to life after some improvised rewiring.

Courtesy Computer Crime