Dear Raj:

I am about to circulate a list of team membership, in which you are 
identified as leader of the Onboard Data Handling team.  You may recall
that the course description specified that "each topic group will be led 
by at least one faculty member."  Although both you and Ron signed onto 
the Onboard Data Handling team, Ron is also involved with the Electrical / 
GPS / Firmware and Risk / Reliability teams, and is liable to wind up 
leading one or both of those groups.  Therefore I've taken the liberty 
of appointing you as team leader for Onboard Data Handling.

I hope you will see your way clear to take this on. As I've said many
times, I don't believe the team leaders should take on the lion's share
of the work, but should rather guide the efforts of the graduate
students, who should be carrying the ball in regard to the actual work,
as far as is reasonable. 

Please let me know your decision at your earliest convenience. If, as
I'm hoping, you're prepared to offer leadership, I sincerely thank you,
and ask you to contact your team members to initiate and organize their
efforts.

I recognize that we do not yet have key data you need, viz. telemetry
data rate, image readout rate and image size. As I indicate in the
following e-mail, I will pass on information from Bristol Aerospace as
soon as I receive it. In the interim I suggest that conservative
estimates would be as follows:
-telemetry: 1 Megabit per second
-image readout rate: 4 images per second
-image size: 1024 by 512 pixels, 12 bits per pixel
These indicate an _image_ data rate of some 25 Mb/s, and that
compression is seriously needed.  At least this gives your team
something to chew on.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Dave