Let's put a pin your prediction; it's definitely an interesting possibility!

    54 seconds of 29.97 frames: 1618.38 frames
    54 seconds of 30.00 frames: 1620.00 frames

Toss in a bit of rounding errors and/or tolerances and it's definitely suspiciously close to where a 1 frame error appears between those two.

I'd suggest that the evidence against it would be that while this may be the longest flight on Mars, it seems certain that they'd have taken longer flights on Earth than this. But still, the math nearly checks out.