Auction house Sotheby’s sold the largest Martian space rock on Earth for $5.3 million Wednesday.
The rock, weighing more than 54 pounds, makes up 6.5% of all currently known material of Martian origin on Earth.
The $5.3 million paid for the rock, dubbed NWA 16788, is the most ever paid to buy a meteorite at auction, Sotheby’s said on social media. Martian meteorites are rare, making up only 400 of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites according to the rock’s lot listing.
Sotheby’s did not say who purchased the Martian meteorite.
The meteorite, found in the West African country of Niger in 2023, is also much larger than other pieces of Mars that have been unearthed on Earth.
Sotheby’s said in the listing that NWA 16788 is about 70% larger than the next-largest Martian meteorite.
“That chunk had to be loose enough to break off, and then it had to get on the right trajectory to travel 140 million miles to Earth, and then it had to land in a spot where someone could find it. And then we were lucky enough that someone came by who knew enough about meteorites to recognize that it wasn’t just a big rock,” Sotheby’s Vice Chairman of Science and Natural History Cassandra Hatton told Gothamist.
Scientists were able to confirm the rock’s extraterrestrial origins, Ms. Hatton told Gothamist, by comparing gas trapped in bubbles inside the rock to data taken in 1976 by NASA’s Viking lander.
