Since May 2016, NASA’s Curiosity rover has used software called AEGIS - Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science - to pick its own targets for ChemCam, the instrument that zaps rock with a laser and reads the glowing plasma to measure chemical composition. Normally a rover waits hours for commands from Earth before it can take a measurement. AEGIS lets Curiosity analyze images from its navigation cameras, identify rocks that match criteria set by the science team, and fire ChemCam at the best one without a human in the loop.
The system works well enough to change how the mission operates. A 2017 paper in Science Robotics by Raymond Francis, Tara Estlin and colleagues at JPL reported that over the previous 2.5 kilometers of driving into unexplored terrain, AEGIS selected the most desired type of target more than 93 percent of the time, against roughly 24 percent expected from untargeted pointing. Because the rover no longer sits idle waiting for instructions, AEGIS increased the amount of data ChemCam collected.
AEGIS was a practical demonstration that an unmanned spacecraft tens of millions of miles away could make its own science decisions. The technology was later carried forward to the SuperCam instrument on the Perseverance rover, part of a broader move toward giving rovers more onboard autonomy so they spend less time waiting for Earth.