By Roselle Chen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A 54-pound (24.5-kg) Martian meteorite that is the largest known piece of Mars found on Earth has sold for $5.3 million at Sotheby’s, setting a new auction record for a meteorite.
The auction on Wednesday for the rock known as NWA 16788 sparked a 15-minute bidding war between online and phone bidders.
“This is an amazing Martian meteorite that broke off of the Martian surface,” said Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s vice-chairman and global head of science and natural history, ahead of the auction.
The fragment was discovered in November 2023 by a meteorite hunter in the Sahara Desert, in Niger’s remote Agadez region.
“The people there knew already that it was something special,” said Hatton. “It wasn’t until it got to the lab and pieces were tested that we realized, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s Martian.’ And then when those results came back and we compared and saw, OK, it’s not just Martian, it is the biggest piece of Mars on the planet.”
About 5 million years ago, an asteroid or comet slammed into Mars so hard that rocks and other debris launched into space.
“So it comes hurtling… 140 million miles through space, makes it through Earth’s atmosphere,” said Hatton, noting that most things burn up in our planet’s atmosphere.
“It’s incredible that it made it through and then that it crashed in the middle of the desert instead of the middle of the ocean, in a place where we could find it, and that somebody who could recognize what it was found it.
“So there’s a whole kind of process or a layer of things that have to happen in order for this to become reality and be here in front of us.”
Just like its mother planet, NWA 16788 has a distinctly reddish hue, as well as signs of fusion crust from its violent descent through Earth’s atmosphere.
There are about 400 officially recognized Martian meteorites on Earth, of which NWA 16788 is by far the largest.
(Reporting by Roselle Chen, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
