Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Helped Land Apollo Astronauts on the Moon, Has Dies at 90
She led a 100-engineer team that wrote Apollo flight software and helped define software engineering, MIT said.
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed on October 8 the death of Margaret Hamilton, the pioneering software engineer who led Apollo missions' on-board flight software development. She was 90 and died on September 30; the cause was not disclosed.
- Hamilton joined the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in 1965 and led a team of 100 engineers designing guidance software for NASA's Apollo missions, work that established her as a founder of the professional field of 'software engineering.'
- During the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton's software overrode an errant radar command three minutes before landing, an intervention NASA said "permitted the mission to safely continue." She also introduced a failsafe called "the Lauren error."
- In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contributions to science, recognizing earlier honors including NASA's 2003 Exceptional Space Act Award.
- Draper Laboratory CEO Jerry Wohletz said Hamilton left an "indelible mark" through her leadership, helping ensure Apollo astronauts landed safely and returned home, cementing her legacy as a foundational figure in space exploration.
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American computer science, which directed lunar mission flight programs and popularized the term “software engineering”, has passed away at age 90
The U.S. mathematician and software pioneer Margaret Hamilton programmed the computer for the first moon landing. For this she gained world fame only late. Now she has passed away at the age of 90.
Hamilton, head of the MIT team that collaborated with NASA, has died at the age of 90. The post Margaret Hamilton, the woman who wrote the Apollo software, has died appeared first on in.gr.
Margaret Hamilton, the woman who took the man to the Moon, has passed away at age 90, as reported by MIT in a note last morning. The scientist was a pioneer in computer science, although her name is in the story for having been director of the software engineering team of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory during NASA's Apollo program. Although death was reported on Wednesday, the death occurred on September 30th.Read more...
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