Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton poses with the Apollo guidance software she and her team developed at MIT. (Image Credit: MIT Museum)

1969 Image shows MIT computer scientist with NASA’a Apollo flight software

By Editorial Team Last updated Feb 17, 2017

What appears to be simply a woman standing next to a tall stack of papers is actually one of the computer scientists that wrote the code that helped put NASA astronauts on the Moon in 1969.

Margaret Hamilton began working as a programmer in 1959 on software projects for a professor at MIT. In 1961 she led the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which teamed up with NASA to develop the Apollo program’s guidance system.

According to MIT News, Hamilton added the Apollo software last month to the code-sharing site GitHub. This is how she describes her role in space exploration:

“From my own perspective, the software experience itself (designing it, developing it, evolving it, watching it perform and learning from it for future systems) was at least as exciting as the events surrounding the mission. … There was no second chance. We knew that. We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. 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.”

Story via MIT News.