Developing and evaluating a lossless compression scheme for scientific data from a nanosatellite

This paper examines the problem of of developing a lossless compression scheme for data from a nano-satellite being developed by the University of Saskatchewan Space Design team, the USST-Sat. The benefit of compressing scientific data from the satellite will be an increased ability to perform experiments and downlink the results. Goals for the compression scheme are to maximize space savings and result in a net energy savings over storing and transmitting uncompressed data. Our evaluations show that the custom scheme that we developed, called USST-Compress, performs compression as well as or better than the generic compression schemes evaluated, and additionally results in better net energy savings.