A novel locking mechanism for future space mirrors assembly is presented. Using this locking mechanism, future primary mirror segments can be autonomously locked and unlocked. This compact design adopts passive locking mode, which improves the on-orbit autonomous assembly performance. In this paper, first, the design details and operation principle are addressed. Then, the failure conditions are discussed. By the external driving force, the static structural analysis and dynamic analysis are implemented to validate the design scheme. The final results show that the proposed locking mechanism avoids significant failure conditions and is considerably power efficient. © 2018 SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.