The computer scientist and Indiana native who led the team that created the onboard software for NASA's Apollo missions has died. Margaret Hamilton died Sept. 30 at age 90, her family confirmed.
Hamilton graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., with a degree in mathematics and a minor in philosophy before heading to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Instrumentation Laboratory. At M.I.T., she joined a team tasked with creating in-flight computers for NASA's mission to the moon.
She would go on to lead the team that created the software that guided the onboard computers in the command and lunar modules on the Apollo flights. She's also credited with establishing the concept of software engineering.
"From my own perspective, the software experience itself (designing it, developing it, evolving it, watching it perform and learning from it for future systems) was at least as exciting as the events surrounding the mission," Hamilton told MIT News in 2009.
As recounted in her M.I.T. obituary, Hamilton's most famous moment may be what happened as the Apollo 11 astronauts were preparing to land on the moon in July 1969.
M.I.T. writes, "Moments before the Eagle module was set to land on the lunar surface, the onboard computer raised the alarm. It had detected a 1202 error: The computer was overloaded due to a fault in a hardware switch, and it was possible the system would not be able to handle the complex landing procedure.
"But Hamilton and her team had engineered priority-driven software, able to shut down unnecessary background tasks in order to prioritize mission-critical tasks. Houston trusted Hamilton’s software and allowed the mission to proceed, and two men walked on the moon for the first time."
Hamilton left M.I.T. in the 1970s and would go on to found two software companies in the following decades. Earlham awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 2025 for her role as a "path-breaker in the male-dominated realm of scientific application."
President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
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