Case study · An Earth observation satellite operator
More scenes through the same pass.
Compressing imagery on board to fit six times as much through each ground station pass
- Mission operators
- Payload engineers
- Ground segment teams
Download the case study10 pages · PDF · 2026
- more scenes per pass
- 6.2×
- more scenes per pass
- on-board power
- < 2 W
- on-board power
- new ground stations
- 0
- new ground stations
What’s inside
The whole story, with the numbers.
The bottleneck
More sensor than downlink: scenes waited days in storage for a pass with room.
Running on board
Fitting the codec into the payload’s power and memory budget.
Surviving the link
Streams that decode cleanly when packets drop near the horizon.
What analysts see
Side-by-side checks with the raw imagery, and the bound that keeps them honest.
Contents
5 chapters.
- 01A downlink that couldn’t keep up
- 02Fitting a codec on the payload
- 03Handling a lossy link
- 04Image quality and analyst sign-off
- 05The results over six months
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