A 54-pound meteorite, the largest ever discovered originating from Mars, sold at auction Wednesday for over $5 million.
The rock, designated NWA 16788, was listed for sale at the Sotheby’s auction in New York, according to The Associated Press (AP). Reaching a winning bid of $4.3 million, fees and other costs pushed the total sale price to approximately $5.3 million, the auction house said. Sotheby’s did not disclose the buyer of the meteorite. Prior to the sale, Sotheby’s estimated its value at somewhere between $2 and $4 million.
“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s vice chairman for science and natural history, said in a pre-auction interview. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”
Measuring nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches, Sotheby’s said that it accounts for almost 7% of all the Martian material on Earth at this time. Described as having red, brown and gray coloration, the meteorite is approximately 70% larger than the next largest sample known to exist, according to the auction house.
Contributing to the high sale price of NWA 16788 is the fact that Martian meteorites are extremely rare, the AP reported. Only 400 such objects have discovered on earth. (RELATED: ‘In A League Of Its Own’: Mysterious Boulder Discovered By NASA Rover On Mars)
The Martian rock was blasted off the surface of the red planet during a huge meteor strike, according to Sotheby’s. The auction house estimated that the rock made a 140 million mile journey through space to earth before striking the ground in the Sahara Desert. It was discovered in 2023 by a meteorite hunter searching in Niger. The meteorite was displayed at the Italian Space Agency in Rome, Italy, prior to being transferred to the auction house.