Shadorne...Yes, interpolation is a fall-back method which is just an alternative to aborting. The R/S algorithm used for CDs will only fail for very severe damage. It is not intended that interpolation should occur for any significant length of time.
The "robustness" of the RS algorithm (how much bad/lost data it can recover) is chosen according to how noisy the data is expected to be. For a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, and sending back pictures, corruption or total loss of data for more than a minute is fully correctable. The downsode is that a great deal of redundancy is in the data stream so it takes many minutes to transmit a picture that you might download to your computer in a few seconds.
The "robustness" of the RS algorithm (how much bad/lost data it can recover) is chosen according to how noisy the data is expected to be. For a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, and sending back pictures, corruption or total loss of data for more than a minute is fully correctable. The downsode is that a great deal of redundancy is in the data stream so it takes many minutes to transmit a picture that you might download to your computer in a few seconds.