Information theoretic evaluation of sensing and compression of space plasma data

Plasma waves play an important role in the evolution of space plasmas. Typically the volume of data that can be collected exceeds the limits posed by the telemetry system. In this presentation we study the information theoretic limits of the instrumentation used to measure plasma waves with the aim of maximising the amount of information that is transmitted via the telemetry system. To that end, we compare different state of the art sensing and compression techniques, and compare their performance against the fundamental limits for different operational modes of the instruments. Ultimately, we aim to identify the sensing and compression strategies that operate close to the optimum theoretically attainable performance for different operational modes.