Hamilton, the pioneering computer scientist who led the team responsible for the software that guided NASA’s Apollo missions, died Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 90, according to MIT News.
Her work may not have put her in the astronaut seat or made her a celebrity, but when the Apollo 11 mission was in danger, the software Hamilton and her team had built helped make sure the astronauts could continue toward the lunar surface.
And that is exactly why her story deserves to be remembered.
The woman behind the code
Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, and joined MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory in 1965 after learning that the team was developing the software that would help send humans to the moon.
