Margaret Hamilton, whose software guided Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, dies at 90

Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, whose software guided the first moon landing, has died aged 90. Hamilton’s former Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday confirmed her demise in a post. She died on September 30.

She spent over two decades at MIT and performed groundbreaking work. This included, leading the team that programmed the computers for the Apollo 11 program at MIT’s instrumentation lab.

Her cause of death was not revealed.

Who was Margaret Hamilton?

Margaret Hamilton was born in Indiana. She was best known for helping write the computer code for the command and lunar modules used on the Apollo mission to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She started working for MIT in 1959. After MIT’s software engineering division landed a contract with NASA, Hamilton led a team of 100 engineers. She has also been credited as one of the founders of software engineering, a term that was popularised by her.

Hamilton was honoured for her work with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was conferred the award in 2016 by then President Barack Obama for her contributions to science.

Hamilton also authored over 130 publications. Upon leaving MIT she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO. She created her first company Higher order software in 1976. The first was based on her work at MIT and the Apollo mission.

A decade later she founded another company Hamilton Technologies.

Hamilton recently went viral on social media after a photo of her and her team’s code for the Apollo mission resurfaced. The iconic image showed her standing beside bundles of software code.

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She pioneered error prevention

Hamilton is credited with making the Apollo spacecraft’s software more robust and accident-resistant. She introduced the “the Lauren error”, a failsafe named after her daughter.

She had programmed backstops to prevent an astronaut’s hardware from crashing. She was inspired to create the system after her daughter’s space simulation crashed. The issue could have had greater consequences in space.

Her contribution was notably highlighted minutes before the Apollo 11 spacecraft was set to land on the moon. The onboard computer’s alarm indicated an emergency. The spacecraft continued on, with the software overriding the alarm, just as her team intended.

The software’s intervention permitted the mission to continue safely, according to NASA.

“Our astronauts did not have much time, but thankfully they had Margaret Hamilton,” former President Barack Obama had said in reference to the mission.

While talking about the mission in a 2009 interview, Hamilton said “There was no choice but to be pioneers, no time to be beginners”.

Hamilton is survived by her daughter, her son-in-law, two grandsons and four great grandchildren, according to MIT.