Margaret hamilton death nasa
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Margaret Hamilton
By Maia Weinstock | MIT News Office
August 17, 2016
Half a century ago, MIT played a critical role in the development of the flight software for NASA’s Apollo program, which landed humans on the Moon for the first time in 1969. One of the many contributors to this effort was Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist who led the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which in 1961 contracted with NASA to develop the Apollo program’s guidance system. For her work during this period, Hamilton has been credited with popularizing the concept of software engineering.
We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.- Margaret Hamilton
In recent years, a striking photo of Hamilton and her team’s Apollo code has made the rounds on social media and in articles detailing her key contributions to Apollo 11’s success. According to Hamilton, this now-iconic image (at left, above) was taken at MIT in 1969 by a staff photographer for the Instrumentation Laborat
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Unsung heroes in science: Margaret Hamilton
It's 20th July 1969, and the world watches as the Eagle approaches the moon’s surface. Just before landing, a flashing emergency light goes off in the spacecraft. It warns of a hardware issue, and the astronauts must think quickly. Margaret Hamilton watches on from MIT, with a direct feed from Ground Control. With complete confidence in the software that she and her team have created, she informs the crew to continue with their approach. And so, the Eagle has landed.
Early life
Margaret Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana on the 17th August 1936. Her family moved to Michigan, which is where she attended high school and started college, before transferring to Earlham College. She graduated in 1958 with a degree in mathematics, with a minor in philosophy. She was newly married with a young daughter, and took a job with a maths lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to support her family. Here she learned about computers, how they worked and how to program them. Computer science was not yet a taught subject -
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Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)
United States software engineer (born 1936)
For other people named Margaret Hamilton, see Margaret Hamilton.
Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist. She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She coined the term "software engineering", stating "I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."[1][2][3]
On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from
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