why spend so much effort acquiring all the data when we know that most of it will be discarded?
Compressed sensing (also known as compressive sensing, compressive sampling, or sparse sampling) is a Signal processing technique for efficiently acquiring and reconstructing a signal, by finding solutions to underdetermined Linear systems. This is based on the principle that, through Optimization, the sparsity of a signal can be exploited to recover it from far fewer Samples than required by the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. There are two conditions under which recovery is possible:
See here for definition
Basically, as in Data compression, it takes advantage of the order, or Randomness deficit in the data to sample below the Nyquist-Shannon limit
Introduction to compressed sensing