Abstract: Due to the advantages of reducing the burden of ground station support, enhancing the viability and expanding the special application of spacecraft, autonomous navigation has been successfully validated and begun to apply in foreign deep space missions. It will be a key technology for deep space missions in future. As the lack of ground station tracking resources, the development of autonomous navigation will become more important for Chinese deep space exploration program. Based on the upcoming Chinese Mars mission and asteroids mission, the application and development of autonomous navigation for deep space mission is reviewed and analyzed. Then, the optical sensor used in autonomous navigation system of different deep space mission is recapitulated. Finally, according to the asteroids based optical autonomous navigation of "Deep Space 1" mission, the critical techniques associated with its study of autonomous navigation are summarized.