A flight project's mission operations center will concentrate on producing, cataloging and distributing complete and accurate kernels on a timely basis. Kernel updates will be made promptly if/as improved data sources become available.

Users may order those kernels of interest--using these at their home sites to compute needed geometric and related ancillary information. Users may update some kernels and produce their own versions of other kernels to support their own analyses or to provide their colleagues with any improvements in ancillary information resulting from their work.

Each flight project will deliver copies of all SPICE kernels and Toolkit software to the appropriate permanent archive facility, assuring ready availability of this data for future users. User- produced kernels may also be similarly archived.

Because ephemerides for most solar system target bodies are generally available, SPICE is frequently used for planning observations. In this case the observer could be a terrestrial telescope, a user- provided instrument location or a "predict" spacecraft ephemeris produced by NAIF or a mission design organization. In some cases "predict" versions of other SPICE kernels are also made to help simulate a full data processing system. With this flexibility scientists may use SPICE throughout the experiment lifecycle- -from mission planning to detailed observation design to instrument data analysis and finally to correlation of results with those from other sources.