Margaret Hamilton, the scientist who helped Apollo 11 land on the Moon, has died

Margaret Hamilton, the American computer scientist who led the team responsible for developing the software of NASA’s Apollo missions, has died at the age of 90.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Hamilton worked from 1959 until the mid-1970s, confirmed that she died on 30 September.

Hamilton led the Software Engineering Division at MIT and the team that developed and tested the software installed in the spacecraft’s computers for the Apollo 11 mission. That system guided American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during the historic landing on the Moon in 1969.

Moments before the Apollo 11 landing, the on-board computer gave an alarm signalling that the system was being overloaded. The situation risked interrupting the complex landing process, but Hamilton’s team had foreseen such a scenario.

The software was designed so that, in case of overload, it would interrupt lower-priority tasks and concentrate the computer’s capacity on the most important function: landing on the Moon.

Hamilton’s and her team’s work became a symbol of the importance of software in space exploration and contributed to the consolidation of the very term “software engineering”.

A 1969 photograph, in which Hamilton stands next to a tall stack of the printed code of the Apollo programme, has become one of the best-known images associated with the early history of programming.

In 2016, US President Barack Obama honoured Hamilton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for her contribution to science and space exploration. At the medal ceremony, Obama described her as a symbol of a generation of talented women whose contribution helped send humanity into space.

Born in Indiana in 1936, Hamilton studied mathematics and began working at MIT in 1959. In later years she founded her own software development companies, including Hamilton Technologies, which continues to be active in Massachusetts.

Margaret Hamilton is survived by her daughter, son-in-law, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.