In recent months, NASA's space probes and explorers have been receiving software upgrades to increase their autonomy and "intelligence" to aid in exploring without need for intervention from mission controllers.

Now a team of NASA scientists and researchers from Arizona are working on pushing the autonomy of spacecraft even further with software that scans for and determines interesting targets without any intervention from controllers.

Lead scientist Ashley Davies said: "Not only does this software detect activity, it starts making its own measurements before researchers even look at the data".

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