@ChateauErin
True. I can see how most (all) of the data from e.g. the JWST has to be downloaded, since those data *are* the product. But there are situations where this may not be the case, e.g. planing next sol's drive for a rover may require images from the engineering cameras chosen to show a certain direction. Making frequent 360° panoramas (thousands of images) may be feasible if they're kept remotely (cheap storage), but infeasible if they all have to be sent to Earth (expensive comms).