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On Thursday, Google unveiled a giant tribute to Hamilton in California’s Mojave Desert: More than 107,000 mirrors were positioned to reflect moonlight and form her image for one night.
Who is Margaret Hamilton?
Hamilton effectively invented the term “software engineer” with her work developing the Apollo guidance computer, the lifeline for astronauts that controlled the spacecraft, Google said in announcing the artistic honor.
She regularly brought her young daughter, Lauren, to work with her on weekends, according to the search giant. Lauren played in the simulator that her mother built to test in-flight programs and inadvertently led Hamilton to rethink her strategy.
Lauren once crashed the simulator, ending the mission prematurely by hitting a button while the craft was in flight.
So, Hamilton programmed backstops to prevent an astronaut from doing the same midflight, a mistake that would yield far more dire consequences in space, Google says.
Hamilton’s software prevented Apollo 11 disaster
But the software cleared all tasks each time it neared overload, allowing the astronauts to enter the landing commands. The software’s emergency preparedness is thought to have helped save the mission, Hamilton wrote.
“Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world,” she said of the team that developed the software, which had never existed in such a capacity. “There was no choice but to be pioneers.”
Hamilton never left the Earth’s atmosphere, but without her groundbreaking software, it’s unlikely that the American flag would’ve been planted on the moon in July 1969.
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