Well, hhEb09'1, there are just two forms of compression and decompression: lossless, and lossy. With the lossless variety, one can cycle a photo through a billion times and it's bit-for-bit identical to the original. With lossy, after a billion cycles, it's, well, it's visual good-for-nothing goo.

In bitmap reconstruction, pattern matching and transition algorithms are used, along with smoothing filters, in a higher resolution than the original image, in order to theoretically estimate the missing information in the image and fill it in accordingly.

With simple patterns, it does a pretty good job. With complex image patterns, particularly the factal-like nature of edges found in nature, where the same pattern is found throughout a very wide range of scales, from the jagged coastline of a country to the jagged edge of a single rock, it does a very poor job.

Regardless, when dealing with priceless images of other worlds, it should be a felony to compress them in a lossy mode for any purpose other than to use as thumbnails (but the underlying image should be made available), or printed pictures in a magazine.

Unfortunately, it's lossly compressed pictures on various websites which get so jacked up that people can't tell the difference between cornfields in Iowa and compression artifacts.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.