The chip that created the camera phone, one of the most widely used technologies in the world, got its start because of an outer space mission. Even though it didn’t get to go.
In the 1990s, NASA sought smaller and lighter ways to send camera technology into space to take pictures of the solar system. Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, had a spark of inspiration. A team led by Eric Fossum, now a professor at Dartmouth College, invented the CMOS image sensor, the “camera on a chip” behind the proliferation of digital photos and videos that fill up our world.
The video above, the first in a series on tech transfer produced by Caltech’s Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships (OTTCP), outlines how the JPL invention changed the world through the power of tech transfer. The NASA mission for which Fossum and company developed the chip—the Cassini-Huygens project that sent back unprecedented imagery of Saturn and its moons—chose older and more proven cameras instead of the CMOS sensor. But the chip found its way into the corporate world and then our everyday lives. It powered the first webcams that led to our era of videoconferencing, for example.
Eventually, after the invention had led to camera phones and created whole new industries, it would go to space after all. NASA projects like the Mars rovers now use CMOS technology to send back pictures of other worlds in awesome detail.
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