Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who played a critical role in the Apollo 11 Moon landing, has died.

The computer scientist behind groundbreaking research that helped NASA astronauts land on the Moon has died at the age of 90.

Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer in her field and coined the term "software engineering" by leading the team that developed software for NASA's Apollo missions.

Hamilton's former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed his death and announced that he passed away on September 30.

In its statement, MIT said, "To say that Hamilton was a pioneer and was way ahead of his time would be an understatement," and stated that he worked in this field before software engineering became widespread.

Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, where he directed the Software Engineering Department.

In this department, he led a team of engineers who wrote and tested all the in-flight software that enabled US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the Moon for NASA's Apollo 11 project.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper in 2019, she said, "I was attracted both by the idea itself and the fact that it had never been done before. I was the first programmer to join the team and the first woman they hired."

In 1969, minutes before Apollo 11's historic Moon landing, an onboard computer sounded an alarm that an error had occurred.

The detected error showed that the computer was overloaded, and for a moment it was thought that the complex landing could not be performed.

But according to MIT, Hamilton and his team had counteracted such an error by designing "priority-oriented software" that would stop all background tasks and prioritize the most important one: the Moon landing.

The team's famed software engineering was immortalized in a 1969 photo of Hamilton standing next to a towering stack of printed code.

In 2016, Hamilton was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama for his contributions to science and space travel.

At the time, Obama said Hamilton "symbolized the nameless generation of women who helped send humanity into space."

Born in Indiana in 1936, Hamilton first studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955, then transferred to Earlham College, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1958.

A year later, she moved with her husband to Boston, Massachusetts, and took a job at MIT, initially to support her husband during his law education.

Starting in the 1970s, Hamilton used his expertise to launch his own software companies; Of these, Hamilton Technologies currently operates in Massachusetts.

“We are saddened by his death but grateful for the opportunity to celebrate the remarkable achievements he made throughout his long life,” Earlham College said in a statement on social media.