US geointelligence uses error-correcting codes, but beyond that, individual detectors on sensor arrays fail all the time, and you can't go up there to replace t

US geointelligence uses error-correcting codes, but beyond that, individual detectors on sensor arrays fail all the time, and you can't go up there to replace them and you don't want to bring down an entire satellite when it still mostly works, so ground processing needs to be robust to missing data anyway. It's fairly straightforward to just interpolate pixels, but the full process is a bit more sophisticated and also involves building overlay layers rating the quality of each pixel, so follow-on processing like object and change detection is able to take into account not just hey, what am I looking at, but also how reliable is each individual part of the scene. To a human looking at the final image, though, you'd never know the difference. I'm assuming most of what this would be used for is imagery collected from space. For whatever reason, other commenters seem to think this is for holding conversations, but it clearly says it's for data from science missions. Even if you were trying to talk to someone on the other end, though, it's rarely that big a deal if part of a word cuts out. That happens all the time with existing ground-based calls or even just two people in a loud room and the human brain knows how to handle it.