For sale: A 25kg rock. Estimated auction price: US$2 million to US$4 million. Why so expensive? It is the largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth.
Sotheby’s in New York would be auctioning what is known as NWA 16788 on Wednesday as part of a natural history-themed sale that also includes a juvenile Ceratosaurus dinosaur skeleton.
The meteorite is believed to have been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike before traveling 225 million kilometers to Earth, where it crashed into the Sahara, Sotheby’s said.
Photo: Reuters
A meteorite hunter found it in Niger in November 2023, it said.
The red, brown and gray hunk is about 70 percent larger than the next-largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly 7 percent of all the Martian material currently on this planet, it added.
It measures nearly 375mm by 279mm by 152mm.
“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Sotheby’s science and natural history vice chairman Cassandra Hatton said. “It’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”
It is also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, Sotheby’s said.
Hatton said a small piece of the Red Planet remnant was removed and sent to a specialized lab that confirmed it is from Mars. It was compared with the distinct chemical composition of Martian meteorites discovered by the Viking space probe that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.
The examination found that it is an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite,” a type of Martian rock formed from the slow cooling of Martian magma. It has a coarse-grained texture and contains the minerals pyroxene and olivine, Sotheby’s said.
It also has a glassy surface, likely due to the high heat that burned it when it fell through Earth’s atmosphere, Hatton said.
It is not clear exactly when the meteorite hit Earth, but testing shows it probably happened in recent years, Sotheby’s said.
The juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton was found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a gold mine for dinosaur bones. Specialists assembled nearly 140 fossil bones with some sculpted materials to recreate the skeleton and mounted it so it is ready to exhibit, it said.
The skeleton is believed to be from the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, Sotheby’s says.
Its auction estimate is US$4 million to US$6 million.
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