Mars Rover Ops at NASA JPL

OnSight was a tool used in daily operations for the Perseverance rover at NASA JPL, where I worked on a lean ~12-person team in the Ops Lab.

OnSight was a partnership between JPL’s Ops Lab and Microsoft that brought a 1:1 recreation of the Martian surface to the HoloLens. Using daily imagery from satellites and rovers, the environment updated each day so scientists were always working with the latest view of Mars.

This mattered because rover planners are usually scientists, often geologists. Before OnSight, they had to interpret still images like panoramas, which distort the terrain through perspective warping and other artifacts. Being able to walk around Mars the way they would a field site on Earth made planning rover operations far more intuitive.

The catch with the HoloLens was that it was a bit unwieldy for the kind of daily use JPL needed for Perseverance. My task was to take an early web app prototype of OnSight and refresh it, improving the overall UX.