The core research and technology work needed to enable instrument autonomy is to work with scientists within their specialized disciplines and jointly develop the algorithms, which are needed to make the scientific discriminations for onboard decision making. Example research areas are pattern recognition, machine learning and analysis for real-time decisions. Also needed for the more complex payloads is flight software for planning, sequence generation and fault protection which will be leveraged from current spacecraft capability.

Equally important to enable instrument autonomy is to develop efficient instrument borne computational platforms. The challenge here is to build affordable hardware that uses little power and operates in the space radiation environment. FPGA-based hardware is a promising solution, which provides for hardware/software co-designs that allow parallel computations, accelerating of complex algorithms while amenable to radiation mitigation techniques.

Instrument autonomy affords opportunities for close collaboration between scientists, instrument hardware developers and computer scientists. Our approach is to build prototype testbeds, which demonstrate the complete system capability.