Abstract. With the development of space electronic technology, the space payload operation modes are more and more complex, and manual interpretation is prone to errors for much workload. Generally the space payload's operation modes are reflected by its telemetry data. By analysing the characteristics of the payload telemetry data, it is proposed an automatic analysis method of payload operation modes based on divide-and-conquer clustering. The clustering method combines division and incremental clustering. The principle of the method is introduced and the method is validated using the actual payload telemetry data. Furthermore the improved method is proposed to the problems encountered. Experimental results show that divide-and-conquer clustering method has the feature of calculation simple and classification accurate, when applied to the classification of payload operation modes. Furthermore this method can be applied to the other areas of payload data processing by extending the method.