Abstract: Navigation is one of the core technologies for Mars landing. In this paper, the Mars landing navigation capabilities and development trends of autonomous navigation are firs街analyzed, concentrating on the landing environment characteristics and technological challenges. And the research status of autonomous navigation scheme is summarized subject to the specialties and requirements of each flight phase during Mars landing. Furthermore, an in-depth analysis of the latest research progress in autonomous navigation schemes is conducted in the respects of design and configuration of schemes, model building and simulation, navigation performance analysis and so on. Then the required navigation precision on each interface point of flight phases is obtained by comprehensively simulating the whole progress of Mars landing.Finally, the conceive of a "progressive three-stage" autonomous navigation scheme for Mars landing is proposed whileconsidering the present situation and developing trend of technology, which would provide useful data for the design anddemonstration of navigation scheme for future Mars landing.