Margaret Hamilton, who led the MIT Instrumentation Lab team that developed the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program, died Sept. 30 at age 90, MIT reported on Oct. 7. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and authored more than 130 publications.

Born in 1936 in Paoli, Indiana, Hamilton joined MIT's meteorology department in 1959, later worked at Lincoln Laboratory on the SAGE air-defense project, and in 1965 became the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT. The lab held NASA's contract to build the Apollo Guidance Computer's flight software; by 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, when more than 400 people worked on Apollo software. Her team's priority-driven design helped manage the 1202 computer alarm during the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969. Hamilton later founded Higher Order Software and Hamilton Technologies. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016; the source quotes MIT's Olivier de Weck on her legacy.