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

The computer scientist behind groundbreaking research that helped land Nasa’s astronauts on the Moon, has died aged 90.

Margaret Hamilton was a trailblazer in her field, leading the team who developed the software for Nasa’s Apollo missions, which coined the term “software engineering”.

Hamilton’s former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed her death, adding 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, 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 on-board 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, signalling an error was occurring.

The error detected 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 favour the most important – the Moon landing – according to MIT.

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

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.

“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, a son-in-law, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren, according to MIT.