FITS was developed in part because of the problems NASA had with long-term storage formats. NASA realized that they were losing historical data because people w

FITS was developed in part because of the problems NASA had with long-term storage formats. NASA realized that they were losing historical data because people were creating one-off file formats and then losing how they designed and developed them; libraries that understand FITS are available for pretty much every non-trivial language. For what the Vatican wants, it is better than JPEG -- it's lossless, it supports arbitrary color depths, its metadata format is much more extensible than JPEG's Exif, and it can support multiple images per file; for example, holding an entire multiple page manuscript in one file.