Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon, dies at 90

**Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon, dies at 90**

The computer scientist whose pioneering work helped NASA send astronauts to the Moon has died at the age of 90.

Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer in her field, leading the team that created the software for NASA’s Apollo missions and helped popularize the term “software engineering.”

Her former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed her death and said she died on 30 September.

“To say Hamilton was a pioneer - to say she was ahead of her time - would be a dramatic understatement,” MIT said in its statement, adding that she was a software engineer before the role became mainstream.

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

There, she led a team of engineers who wrote and tested all onboard in-flight software for NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, which guided US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe Moon landing.

“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, just before the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing, an onboard computer triggered an alarm, indicating that an error was happening.

The problem showed the computer was overloaded, and for a moment it seemed the complicated landing might fail.

But Hamilton and her team had anticipated such a problem by designing “priority-driven software” that would shut down background tasks and give priority to the most important one - the Moon landing - according to MIT.

The team’s celebrated software engineering was immortalized in a 1969 photograph of Hamilton standing next to the stack of printed code towering beside her.

In 2016, Barack Obama honored Hamilton’s life’s work 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”.

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

She moved to Boston, Massachusetts, a year later with her husband and originally took the MIT job to support him while he studied law.

From the 1970s onward, Hamilton used her expertise to launch her own software companies, including Hamilton Technologies, which remains 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.

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