Science images are NEVER EVER compressed in JPEG. In fact they probably don't even use the TIFF format either. Almost all science images in astronomy are done in the FITS format which I think was developed by NASA. This is because not only does the image need to be lossless raw data in order to be used for proper scientific measurements, but also much metadata must be included with the frame for some kinds of science observations.

Common metadata will include the position of the camera (where the orbiter was when the picture was taken), the camera's orientation (which way it was looking at the time), the exact time when the image was taken, the image exposure time, the camera's CCD temperature, whether on-chip binning has been carried out, the camera's readout noise, the camera's gain, etc. All of this information is necessary for some kinds of science and therefore NASA doesn't want to lose any of this information.

-Buck

Wrong. The 10 to 20 minutes you speak of is the latency, however this 90 minute figure is probably arrived at by taking the size of the image and dividing by the 6mbps transfer rate. It will take 10-20 minutes after the first bits leave Mars and arrive at Earth, however after Earth sees the first bit they will still have to wait 90 minutes to see the last bit.

-Buck

Just so everyone knows, I tried to do something similar to this on my account. I did "Withdraw to bank account" for the full balance and then went to close the account. It then told me I cannot close the account right now as there is a pending withdrawal. I tried to cancel the withdrawal to see if there was an option to withdraw the balance on closing the account and found out that you cannot cancel a withdrawal once you have started it. I don't know if they offer a method to withdraw the amount automatically when you close the account but I just wanted to let everyone here know about these issues (the sneaky bastards probably just pocket the money if you don't withdraw it beforehand).

Anyway I plan to finalize the account closing process "in 3-5 buisiness days" when I get my monies. Hope enough people cancel all at once that they feel the sting.

-Buck

This is kind of a clever post, however I have to wonder why you didn't just post the .torrent file directly as they are normally plaintext and much shorter than the binary-ascii encoded e-mail file that you posted.

-Buck