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points by johnwalkr 8 hours ago | 0 comments
I've shared this article many times. I work in space and the vast majority of the time, new people insist that all images should be raw. After all, you go to great expense to get somewhere in the name of science, you don't want to discard any information. And that's true in some cases but typically not for a whole mission or even a whole image if you can crop a specific part. Usually 100 or 1000 images instead of one is more valuable even if the compression is lossy.

That's just image compression though. Very few space-grade cameras support video compression. In a lot of cases it works well even though you think you're after a series of still images.

[–] jwrallie 3 hours ago
It’s mostly mission dependent as you mentioned, if the value of some images are different than others, compressing several pictures and selecting the best to get in raw is a good strategy, and you can also crop them to get interesting areas as mentioned.

It can also depends on the downlink bandwidth available and power/energy budget, so the optimal strategy will differ.

It can be misleading at times though, for example some interesting feature may happen to be just a compression artifact. A cloud looking like some strange human-made object for example, happened to us one time.

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