WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama honored a software engineer on Tuesday, awarding her the Medal of Freedom for coding work that helped Apollo 11 land on the moon 47 years ago.
Margaret Hamilton led the software engineering division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, responsible for developing the guidance and navigation system for Apollo.
During the medal ceremony, Obama called Hamilton a pioneer of a technology field that wasn’t even named yet when the Apollo missions were launching from Cape Canaveral.
Computer science was so new during the 1969 mission that Hamilton coined the term “software engineering.”
"Luckily for us, Margaret never stopped pioneering," Obama said. "She symbolizes that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space."
Hamilton is one of the many unsung female heroes of early U.S. space exploration, including the women known as "human computers" at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California responsible for calculating flight trajectory.
Minutes before astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would land on the moon Hamilton’s work paid off preventing a mission abort, according to NASA.
A system override by the software meant Armstrong and Aldrin would walk on the moon instead of circling the moon and returning home.
The software was later adapted for use on Skylab and the Space Shuttle Program, according to NASA.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom recognizes especially meritorious contributions to the national interests of the United States, its security and its culture. Obama called the 2016 group that included Diana Ross, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill and Melinda Gates, Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a "particularly impressive class."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.