Why are parts of the right side of the image missing?
It takes a lot of data to represent an image, much more than the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. For Cassini it is more like a million words — data words. Because of the limited space on Cassini’s recorder and the time it takes to transmit that data, cameras on board the spacecraft were built to have the ability to compress the data, that is, to have it take up less space on the recorder. There are two kinds of compression the camera can use — “lossless” and “lossy.” With lossless compression the original data can be completely recovered once it reaches the ground — much like what happens with zip compression for personal computer files or the compression in GIF images. The lossy compression is more efficient and produces smaller files, but does not give the ability to get back all the original data — like the compression in JPEG images or in MP3 audio files. In lossless compression mode, the camera guarantees the compression will result in data at most half the
