alt Hacker NewsIt’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.
It depends but I think it's really rare that "all images shall be downlinked as raw, maximum resolution" is a good idea. But this is a pretty common request to "not lose data". It doesn't make it into the final product, but it is a common request early on in a project. Now keeping storing as raw and being able to download a a cropped raw image later, that is a good idea.