Abstract: The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems （CCSDS） has recently adopted a new recommendation for image data compression algorithm released in 2005 as a staudard. The purpose of the Recommended Standard is to solve the problem of efficiently compressing the digital image two-dimensional spatial data from payload instruments and to specify how this compressed data will be formatted into segments to enable decompression at the receiving end. This algorithm can reduce the amount of digital data to achieve benefits, so it not only can reduce the transmission channel bandwidth, the buffering and storage requirement, but also can reduce the data-transmission time at a given rate. This algorithm has important significance to space data compression. This paper describes the new CCSDS image compression algorithm and performance and analyzes the feasibility of hardware implement. And the testing results between this algorithm and other image compression algorithm under software implementing are compared. From the results, it is shown that the performance is as good or even better than that of JPEG 2000, SPIHT under low bit-rate compression. It completely conforms to the on-board image compression under the low bit-rate.