One of the Martian moons travels between the rover and the sun. It’s a bit different to my usual posts, and not my OC :).
I believe it’s Phobos, so there might be doom music kicking in any second now…
Very likely. Lots of super geeks on staff.
But it’s also possible some astroenthusiast did the math and emailed it to NASA, and whoever got that endo thought it would be cool and passed it to someone who could schedule the instrument. If you think about your geekiest friend and how they’d react if you sent them something truly unique about their geekdom that they could act on - well, that’s pretty much how every engr/scientist at NASA would react.