Yes. *OP said "near real time," which I take to mean "OK to drop some
frames," like the satellite video phones the reporters use from the
boondocks. *Thus, high-def can be confined to a lot lower bandwidth if you
don't mind seeing compression artifacts as each frame is being built on the
screen.

I have a contemporary example: *KABC-DT, Channel 7 Los Angeles is high-def
on 7-1 AND high-def on 7-2, with a service called Living Well. *Seehttp://livingwell.tv/Welcome.html.

Living Well is apparently getting a skimpy bitshare, as compression
artifacts are obvious, especially on scene changes and motion, whereas ABC
programming on 7-1 is just beautiful. *Living Well is very good, sharp HD,
but you can see details being "painted in" for a quarter-second after a
scene change.


There's a fairly complex trade. For a lunar mission, the scene is
going to be pretty static, just shifted. (not like there's a baskeball
team doing a fast break in the field of view), so it should compress
well, given a suitable algorithm.

The challenge is that compression (especially good compression) takes
computational power. So you have a tradeoff: do you spend you joules
on compressing the images and radiate less RF energy, or do you
compress less, and use a bigger power amp. There's also a mass
tradeoff.. big amp or big antenna. The big antenna needs more
accurate pointing, which increases complexity. Or the trade of
frequency selection, higher frequency means more antenna gain, but
usually lower efficiency in the PA and higher NF in the receiver end,
as well as higher probabiliity of weather related fading.

And even there, because Moore's law means that semiconductor
technology is always advancing, the tradespace is shifting towards
more processing (because it gets cheaper in size, weight, power, while
power amps are pretty much at the physics limits)

This is, of course, "rocket science".. or more properly, spacecraft
system engineering. It's straightforward, for the most part, but non-
trivial. Pick your requirements, define the tradespace(s), try
configurations and see what happens.