Margaret Hamilton, who lead the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Lauren. Ms. Hamilton was a young mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering, and she is credited with popularizing the term “software engineering.”
As Apollo 11’s lunar module, Eagle, touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969, Ms. Hamilton, then 32, was patched into Mission Control in Houston from M.I.T. The onboard computers contained only 72 kilobytes of storage memory. Ms. Hamilton had foreseen a potential computer overload; her software prioritized essential tasks, guiding the mission to a safe landing on the Sea of Tranquillity.
In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Ms. Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Its citation reads that her work for NASA “set the foundation for modern, ultrareliable software design and engineering.”
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