Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo astronauts on the Moon, dies

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - WASHINGTON — Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist behind groundbreaking research that helped create the code that helped land Apollo astronauts on the Moon, has died. She was 90.

Hamilton's former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed her death, adding she died on September 30. The cause of her death was not disclosed.

Margaret Hamilton was a trailblazer in her field, leading the team that developed the software for NASA's Apollo missions, which coined the term "software engineering".

"To say Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement," MIT said in its statement, before acknowledging that she was a software engineer before it was mainstream.

Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and managed the Software Engineering Division.

It was in this division that she led a team of engineers writing and testing all onboard in-flight software for NASA's Apollo 11 project that guided US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the Moon.

"I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before. I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired," she told the Guardian in 2019.

In 1969, moments before the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing, an onboard computer raised an alarm, signaling an error was occurring.

The error indicated that the computer was overloaded, and for a moment it looked like the complex landing might not be achieved.

But Hamilton and her team had planned for such an error by engineering "priority-driven software" to shut down any background tasks and favor the most important — the Moon landing — according to MIT.

The software’s intervention, which occurred just three minutes before the first ever touchdown on the lunar surface, “permitted the mission to safely continue,” NASA said.

After its work on Apollo, the MIT Instrumentation Lab spun off to become the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, now known as Draper Laboratory.

Hamilton did not join the company, setting off instead to form her own company, but Draper’s CEO, Jerry Wohletz, said in a statement in MIT’s Wednesday announcement that Hamilton left an “indelible mark.”

“Through her leadership and contributions,” Wohletz said, “she helped ensure that Apollo astronauts landed safely on the lunar surface and safely returned home. We will honor her legacy at Draper forever.”

The team's famous software engineering was immortalized in a 1969 photograph of Hamilton standing beside the stack of printed code that towered beside her.

In 2016, Hamilton's life work was honored by Barack Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to science and space travel.

At the time, Obama said Hamilton "symbolises that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space".

Hamilton, born in Indiana in 1936, first studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before moving to Earlham College, where she got a BA in mathematics in 1958.

She then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, a year later with her husband and originally took the job at MIT to support her husband during his law degree.

From the 1970s onwards, Hamilton used her expertise to found her own software businesses, including Hamilton Technologies, which is still based in Massachusetts.

"We are saddened by her death, but grateful for the opportunity to have celebrated her extraordinary achievements throughout her long life", Earlham College said in a statement on social media.

"Her pioneering spirit and remarkable legacy will continue to inspire generations of Earlhamites," the statement said.

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