Margaret Hamilton, a computing pioneer and scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), died on 30 September at the age of 90, the institute announced on Wednesday.
Hamilton led the development of the software for the Moon mission, and her software powered the first Moon landing. She was trained in programming by a renowned MIT meteorologist, and then refined her programming skills at the institute’s laboratory. There, she wrote software that could detect enemy aircraft. When the institute received a NASA contract to develop Apollo software, she seized the opportunity.
'I was the first programmer to join and the first woman to be hired,' Hamilton said.
In 1969, just minutes before the Apollo 11 spacecraft was due to land on the Moon’s surface, an alarm sounded on the spacecraft’s computer, indicating an emergency. Faced with the decision of whether to abort the mission, the spacecraft continued, and the software functioned exactly as Hamilton and her team had intended.
'In the end, it became clear that the software not only alerted us that there was a problem with the hardware, but it compensated for it by restarting and re-establishing the highest priority tasks. The error detection and recovery mechanisms stepped in,' Hamilton said.
The incident was referenced by Barack Obama when he presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. 'Our astronauts didn’t have much time, but fortunately, they had Margaret Hamilton,' Obama said.
Hamilton leaves behind a daughter, a son-in-law, two grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, according to MIT. In an interview with MIT News in 2009, she said: 'Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; there was no time for beginners.'
