American programmer Margaret Hamilton, who together with her team developed software for the manned Apollo missions, has died in Cambridge at the age of 90. Her code helped prevent the failure of the historic moon landing in 1969, writes Bild.
On July 20, 1969, as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were descending in the "Eagle" lunar module to the surface of the Moon, the onboard computer unexpectedly began issuing alarm signals with codes 1201 and 1202. The system was overloaded, and there was a threat that the landing would have to be aborted.
However, the program developed by Hamilton's team was skilled at prioritizing: it disabled secondary tasks and continued to perform the most important operations. Thanks to this, the computer coped with the overload, and mission control allowed the landing to continue.
Hamilton led the development of the onboard software at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More than 400 people worked on the programs for the Apollo missions. In the 1960s, programming remained predominantly a male field, but Hamilton became one of the key figures of the project.
In 2016, US President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the country's highest civilian honor.
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