Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped found the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA’s Apollo astronauts on the Moon and win the 20th century space race, has died. She was 90 years old.
Hamilton’s former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, confirmed his death in a message from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She died on September 30, MIT reported. The cause of his death has not been revealed.
It was while working at MIT, where she accepted a job in 1959 and remained until the mid-1970s, that Hamilton headed the software engineering division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. The division landed a contract with NASA in 1961. She eventually led a team of 100 engineers who designed the software to guide NASA’s Apollo missions.
Through her work, Hamilton is also recognized as one of the founders of the field of software engineering – a term she popularized – helping to establish it as a professional practice.
“To say that Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer – to say that she was ahead of her time – would be an understatement,” Olivier de Weck, Apollo professor and interim head of MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said in a statement. “She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself, but also led a team using this nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity has ever made.”
Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2016 for his contributions to science and space travel.
Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, according to MIT, and studied at the University of Michigan before earning her degree in mathematics from Earlham College in Indiana. She took a job at MIT while her husband studied law at Harvard.
While working to develop essential onboard software for the spacecraft – command modules and lunar landers – that complemented NASA’s historic Apollo flights – Hamilton is credited with making the system more robust and more resistant to accidents.
One of the oft-cited safety measures she introduced was the “Lauren mistake,” according to MIT, which is named after her daughter and was discovered while the 4-year-old was playing with an Apollo command module simulator.
“She liked playing astronaut because she saw me playing that way in some simulations we were running,” Hamilton later recalled in an oral history project. “It was in a hardware simulation because we wanted to try how the software worked with all the other things – the astronaut, the hardware. So I remember one time Lauren’s simulation crashed and I thought, ‘Oh my God, how did that happen?’
So, Hamilton programmed safety devices to prevent an astronaut from encountering the same problem mid-flight, a problem that would have had far more disastrous consequences in space.
NASA cited one notable example in which Hamilton’s work contributed to mission success: During the famous 1969 Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton’s software overturned a misguided attempt to replace the flight computer’s main processing with a radar system.
The software intervention, which occurred just three minutes before the first landing on the lunar surface, “allowed the mission to continue safely,” NASA said.
After its work on Apollo, the MIT Instrumentation Lab separated to become the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, today known as the Draper Laboratory.
Hamilton did not join the company, preferring to start his own company, but Draper CEO Jerry Wohletz said in a statement released Wednesday by MIT that Hamilton had left an “indelible mark.”
“Through her leadership and contributions,” Wohletz said, “she helped ensure that the Apollo astronauts landed safely on the lunar surface and returned home safely. We will forever honor her legacy at Draper.”
In 2003, Hamilton also received NASA’s Exceptional Space Act Award.
The technologist who nominated Hamilton for the honor, Paul Curto, said at the time: “I was surprised to discover that she was never officially recognized for her groundbreaking work.” »
“His concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling, end-to-end testing and man-in-the-loop decision-making capabilities, such as priority display, became the basis for ultra-reliable software design,” he said.
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