A rock from Mars that was found in the Sahara desert in November 2023 has sprayed all records in an auction in New York.
A 25 -kilogram meteorite. The largest piece of Mars found on Earth already has an owner, and is an anonymous buyer who won the Sotheby’s auction after a bid of 4.3 million dollars. It will pay 5.3 million, if we add taxes and fees, the highest Price ever paid by a meteorite.
The rock, baptized as NWA 16788, weighs no less than 24.67 kilograms. With its almost 38 centimeters long, it is 70% larger than the previous largest Martian meteor.
From Mars to an anonymous collector. NWA 16788 had traveled 225 million kilometers when a meteorit hunter took him in the remote region of Agadez, in Niger. It did not gently detach from Mars. He was torn from his surface due to the impact of such a violent asteroid that liquefied part of his minerals and catapulted him to space.
From there, he undertook a trip of about 225 million kilometers before the earthly gravity attracted him. Its reddish cortex and depressions on its surface are the scars of its entrance through our atmosphere. It is now officially a luxury object that shows that it is possible to speculate with Martian soil.
The extraterrestrial market is booming. This sale is not an isolated event, but the confirmation of an upward trend. The meteorit market is an active niche where the rarity, size and history of rocks trigger prices, but none has reached a price as high as NWA 16788.
The one that was closest was the Fukang meteorite, famous for its embedded Olivino gems. In 2008, the Bonhams house tried to sell it for 2 million dollars. Pujadores preferred to invest their money in the fossilized manure of a dinosaur that was 130 million years old. In 2021, the Christie’s house sold a Martian meteor for $ 200,000.
Who knows if we will see it in a museum. The sale of such a singular meteor has revived, as expected, an old controversy in the scientific community. Many regret that a piece of incalculable value for science and dissemination can end up in a private battleship chamber. Being anonymous, the buyer’s intentions are unknown
Fortunately, not all meteorite is lost to science. A reference sample has been preserved at the Purple Mountain Observatory, in China to analyze it.
Imagen | Sotheby’s
In WorldOfSoftware | The largest piece of Mars on Earth is not in a museum, or a laboratory: it is in a auction house
