Largest chunk of Mars on Earth sells for $5.3 million
The 54-pound rock measures roughly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches. It was part of a Sotheby's natural history auction that also included a juvenile Ceratosaurus dinosaur skeleton and a lunar meteorite.
The meteorite is believed to have been blown off the surface of Mars by an asteroid. The chunk of the Red Planet then travelled 140 million miles to Earth, crashing in the Sahara desert. It was discovered by a meteorite hunter in Niger in November 2023. However, it is not completely clear when the meteorite hit Earth. Testing shows that the strike probably happened in recent years, according to Sotheby's. It previously was on exhibit at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby's did not disclose the space rock's previous owner.
The red, brown and gray rock is roughly 70 percent larger than the next biggest piece of Mars ever found here on Earth. It also makes up nearly 7 percent of all the Martian material currently on our planet, according to Sotheby's.
'There's a big, orbital donut full of battered bits of Mars, launched by cratering events, and the Earth clearly intercepts that stream all the time,' Ralph Harvey, a geochemist who studies plenary materials at Case Western University, tells Popular Science. 'There's really no substitute for 'ground truth,' and the Martian meteorites represent the only known samples from that planet.'
Cassandra Hatton, the vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby's, told the Associated Press that this Martian meteorite was confirmed to be from the Red Planet in a specialized lab. The sample's chemical make up was compared with Martian meteorites that were discovered in 1967, when the Viking space probe landed on Mars.
The official examination found that the now sold rock is an olivine-microgabbroic shergottite. This type of Martian rock was formed by the slow cooling of magma on Mars. Sotheby's says that it has a course-grained texture and the minerals pyroxene and olivine. The auction house estimates that there are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites that have been discovered on Earth.
According to Harvey, recovering samples from any planetary body beyond Earth is challenging enough due to technology, science, and funding. It has only been done about a dozen times, making this material quite precious. Grabbing what we can when it falls is our best bet.
'There are a lot more rocks falling to Earth from space than most people realize; the total mass of meteoritic material is a few tens of thousands of tons per year,' says Harvey. 'From that, maybe 10-20,000 bits will actually be rocks that hit the Earth's surface. It's the equivalent of a softball-sized rock each million square kilometers, and distributed very randomly.'
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