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Margaret Heafield Hamilton - The Woman Who Saved Apollo 11
Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, Margaret led development of on-board flight software for the Apollo space program.
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Margaret was responsible for implementing the Apollo on-board guidance software required to navigate and land on the Moon. She worked tirelessly to gain hands-on experience during a time when computer science courses and software engineering courses did not yet exist.
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Three minutes before the Apollo 11 Lunar lander reached the Moon's surface, the Apollo Guidance Computer averted an abort of the landing on the Moon when several computer alarms were triggered.
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The computer was overloaded with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power supplied to the lander's rendezvous radar. The asynchronous executive designed allowed the computer to cope with the increased demand by prioritizing tasks.
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Hamilton credits the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) together with its asynchronous executive as a foundation that provided the means for her to design systems software that included AGC error detection and recovery mechanisms.
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So, in other words...Margaret saved the Apollo 11 astronauts, their spacecraft, and the hopes of an entire nation.
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A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline.
Her incredible lifelong contribution was recognized with countless awards and honors including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, whose citation noted: “Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon.”
Thank you, Margaret!
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