![View of the Hindsight application: drive panel synchronization (A) ensures consistent arrangement of data sources. The playhead (B) is accessible across the drive panel, tying all visualizations to the same timestamp. The fault in question is highlighted across data in red via the fault overlay (C). -- [cs.HC]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Hindsight.png?fit=1200%2C680&ssl=1)
[cs.HC] While Mars rover operators plan drives across hazardous Martian terrain and diagnose unexpected faults, the necessary information is distributed across separate systems and often reconstructed through manual correlation and memory.
To address this challenge, we partnered with Mars rover operators at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to introduce Hindsight, a visual analytics system that unifies previously disparate rover drive data into a single workspace for search, comparison, and investigation.
This paper presents a design study of the Hindsight application. The partnership revealed that operators reason about drives as holistic spatiotemporal episodes rather than discrete parameters.
By externalizing operator intuition into an explicit visual query process, we argue that Hindsight transforms analysis into a structured, shareable workflow.
Preliminary feedback from operators suggests Hindsight supports their ability to correlate terrain, telemetry, and fault events within a singleworkspace.
Luke Fiorante, Leslie Liu, Adam Xu, Xianmei Lei, Darwin Chiu, Krys Blackwood, Maggie Hendrie, Scott Davidoff, Santiago V. Lombeyda, Hillary Mushkin
Comments: In press for the 2026 IEEE Conference on Visualization (VIS 2026)
Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.16537 [cs.HC] (or arXiv:2607.16537v1 [cs.HC] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.16537
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Submission history
From: Scott Davidoff
[v1] Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:24:15 UTC (12,663 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16537
Astrobiology,
