Scientific operations of PROBA-3/ASPIICS are planned over 3 levels of detail and anticipation:
- Long term planning (Mission Plan): a baseline covering the whole mission and defined prior to launch date
- Mid-term planning: covering a period of 3 months and defined every 3 months, one month in advance of the 3-month period
- Short term planning: covering a period of 4 weeks and revised every week, one week in advance of the 4-week period.
As ASPIICS can record more data in a 6-hour observation period than can be downloaded to the ground in one week, so a selective downlink scheme is available. Operations must take this constraint into account. Selective downlink requests are provided to the spacecraft by time of writing the data in the spacecraft memory (with thus a delay with respect to the actual observation time).