Space Technology Transfer 14.5 million photos are uploaded to the Internet every hour, and 85% of them are taken with a smartphone camera using CMOS active-pixel sensor, technology born at the NASA JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory where the concept of the first digital camera was also conceived. While searching for a small, light, and robust image sensor that can resist the extreme environment of space, in 1990 Eric Fossum and Sabrina Kemeny started to work on the CMOS technology that revolutionized the communication industry, and impacted the automotive, surveillance and medical sectors.