Those are some really good puzzle game bones you have here! Though it may have been less in keeping with the theme, you may consider giving the player control (heh) over when the explorer moves (e.g. press "Space" to advance time by one frame). That's a minor nit pick though, mostly arising from my enjoyable frustration (a hard thing to nail!) whenever I realized my mistake and had to restart a level.
I think you could do a lot of cool things with this idea, and I'd love to see it developed beyond the 48 hour constraint imposed by the jam. Great job!