Add this to the list of “things that might be fun if you had a buttload of money”: Someone forked over $5.3 million in a Sotheby’s auction to own a piece of Mars. The Red Planet meteorite was discovered in 2023 in a remote area of the Sahara Desert in Niger.
Martian meteorites of any size are incredibly rare. To get here, an asteroid first hits the Red Planet to eject material from its surface. (Sotheby’s says there are only 19 Martian craters large enough to have spit out this one.) That chunk then has to travel 140 million miles through space to reach Earth. Only 400 of the 77,000+ officially recognized meteorites hail from Mars.
The meteorite is known as NWA 16788. Its reddish-brown, scarred exterior almost looks like the Red Planet’s surface in miniature.
This is also an exceptionally big Martian meteorite. It’s about 70 percent larger than the second-biggest piece of Mars found on Earth. It measures 14.75 x 11 x 6 inches and weighs over 54 lbs. It’s big enough to represent about 6.5 percent of all known Martian material on our planet.
The winning bid was for $4.3 million. After fees, that comes out to over $5.3 million, making it the most valuable meteorite ever sold.
Before bidding, the auction house sent a small piece of the space rock to a lab, which confirmed its distinctly Martian chemical composition. Over 21 percent of the rock is composed of maskelynite, a glass produced when the asteroid struck the Martian surface.