The camera in your pocket was actually made to go to outer space. NASA explains how the sensor inside billions of devices was first developed for space missions

The camera in your pocket is hiding tech that was originally made for outer space. The sensor that is now widely used in most smartphone cameras, compact cameras, and mirrorless cameras – the “camera-on-a-chip” CMOS Active Pixel sensor – actually got its start inside a NASA lab.

Before CMOS sensors, digital cameras used charge-coupled devices or CCD sensors. This classic sensor design gathers light from the pixels and sends it to an amplifier in order to convert energy from the light into a digital photograph.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tasked Dr. Eric Fossum with advancing the existing CCD sensor for use in outer space in the early 90s. Instead, Fossum ended up taking a tech from CCD and applying it to CMOS sensors, creating the type of sensor called a CMOS Active Pixel Sensor, or “camera-on-a-chip,” that’s now used in the majority of modern cameras.

The issue with CCD sensors wasn’t image quality – in fact, the format was known to create images with less noise than CMOS, at least at the time. But, CCD sensors are power-hungry, a challenge when developing digital cameras to outfit tech like the Hubble Space Telescope, which uses CCD sensors.

What Fossum did was take a CCD tech called “intra-pixel charge transfer with correlated double sampling” and apply it to CMOS technology. The resulting sensor measured light twice, and by subtracting the two values, corrected the noise issue that early CMOS sensors were known for.

The change wasn’t just about image quality, though. The change also helped the CMOS sensors to better withstand radiation and also required less power to run – both key features for a camera designed to be sent to space. The tech also decreased the size and increased the speed of digital imaging.

Today, this tech is behind a number of photographs taken from space – but the CMOS Active Pixel Sensor originally launched from a NASA research project is also now the most common type of digital sensor inside smartphones, compact cameras, and mirrorless cameras, with an estimated 7 billion of these sensors created every year.

The research recently earned Fossom the 2026 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering – and created the tech that’s now in many pockets.

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