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.
replyIt 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.
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