Feasibility and performances of compressed sensing and sparse map-making withHerschel/PACS data

The Herschel Space Observatory of ESA was launched in May 2009 and has been in operation ever since. From its distant orbit around L2, it needs to transmit a huge quantity of information through a very limited bandwidth. This is especially true for the PACS imaging camera, which needs to compress its data far more than what can be achieved with lossless compression. This is currently solved by including lossy averaging and rounding steps onboard. Recently, a new theory called compressed sensing has emerged from the statistics community. This theory makes use of the sparsity of natural (or astrophysical) images to optimize the acquisition scheme of the data needed to estimate those images. Thus, it can lead to high compression factors.