please see this thread for my explanation on the matter.
www.abovetopsecret.com...
heres a few excerpts from it for you lazy bums
the motive is obvious. if you have control over one direct flow of multimedia from a planet, you don't have to worry about funny pictures like that
Mars Face or a ship docking with Olympus Mons (made that up)
if you have several space agencies that you may NOT have direct or indirect control of, you will have all of that multimedia being spread around like
a virus. an intelligence virus.
this is why on CSPAN they show you Spirit's work in progress, but with goofy 3-d vision (the red/blue on black and white pictures)... AND they
restrict certain pictures. I caught the guy say at least once, "and here is another picture of the curious large rock formations. hmmm, i guess
not." Because the picture remained the same as before. And he proceeded, like a programmed dolt, speaking of the picture that shouldve replaced the
old one but didn't, "You could see a truly alien surface around here, and we were talking about sending Spirit to investigate the rock formations."
then he bored the hell out of everyone, and then put on an engineer to talk about the dumb craft and not the data from the planet.
how much data is the mission receiving from the Mars crafts? the guy said: "we're bouncing off from MGS @ 100Kbs about 100Mbs of data, and we're
getting more bandwidth by getting other ortbial sattelites to work in coordination with the crafts thus increasing the efficiency"
that's a lot of data, and all you get to see are dumb pictures. not always in color, and not always panoramic.