Moonlight Strikes 107,000 Solar Mirrors & Creates a Portrait of Apollo 11 Computer Programmer Margaret Hamilton

In the mid­dle of the Mojave Desert, Google has cre­at­ed a high-tech trib­ute to Mar­garet Hamil­ton, the lead soft­ware engi­neer of the Apol­lo space pro­gram. Google writes: “The trib­ute was cre­at­ed by posi­tion­ing over 107,000 mir­rors at the Ivan­pah Solar Facil­i­ty in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mir­rors nor­mal­ly do. The result is a 1.4‑square-mile por­trait of Mar­garet, big­ger than New York’s Cen­tral Park.” You can learn more about Hamil­ton and her con­tri­bu­tions to the 1960s space pro­gram here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­garet Hamil­ton, Lead Soft­ware Engi­neer of the Apol­lo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Tech­nol­o­gy Behind Wi-Fi & Blue­tooth Dur­ing WWII

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

NASA Puts Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load