[XorNot]

Distant space probes are power constrained though.

It's entirely possible the degradation of their RTG power sources would be more expensive doing the compression then just sending the data as is.

[lstodd]

RTG degrade no matter what you do with the resulting heat. It doesn't matter if you compress stuff or just let them cpus idle be.

[XorNot]

That's the point: you're going to spend a lot more time compressing when you could've just been sending data.

And you're eating into a limited overall power and weight budget to do rather then say, run the science on the probe.