August 31, 2025
Martian Meteorite sells at Sotheby’s for a record of 5.3 million US dollars
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Martian Meteorite sells at Sotheby’s for a record of 5.3 million US dollars

From Roselle Chen

New York (Reuters) -A 54 pounds (24.5 kg) Martian meteorite, which is the largest known piece of Mars on Earth, has sold Sotheby’s $ 5.3 million and sets up a new auction record for a meteorite.

The auction on Wednesday for the rock, known as NWA 16788, triggered a 15-minute bidding war between online and telephone providers.

“This is an astonishing martian meteorite that broke off the Marsian surface,” said Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s deputy chairman and global director of science and natural history, before the auction.

The fragment was discovered in November 2023 by a meteorite hunter in the Sahara desert in the remote region of Niger.

“The people there already knew that it was something special,” said Hatton. “Only when the laboratory came and the pieces were tested did we realize: ‘Oh my god, it is Mars.’ And when these results came back and we compared and seen, OK, it’s not just Mars, it is the biggest piece of Mars on the planet.

About 5 million years ago, an asteroid or comet, which was so hard in the Mars, popped so hard that Rockt and other debris were started into space.

“So it races … 140 million miles through the room through the earth’s atmosphere,” said Hatton, noticing that most things burn in the atmosphere of our planet.

“It is incredible that it managed to do it in the middle of the desert instead of the middle of the ocean, in a place we could find it, and that someone who could see what it found.

“So there is a whole type of process or level of things that have to happen so that this becomes a reality and is here before us.”

Just like its mother planet, the NWA 16788 has a significantly reddish shade and signs of a fusion crust from its violent descent through the earth’s atmosphere.

There are around 400 officially recognized Mars meteorites on Earth, of which NWA 16788 is by far the largest.

(Reporting by Roselle Chen, editing of Rosalba O’Brien)

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