Largest piece of Mars on Earth sells for nearly $5.3 million at auction

A bidder here on Earth shelled out a lot of green for a piece of the red planet on Wednesday when Sotheby's put a Martian meteorite up for auction.

NWA 16788, the largest piece of Mars on Earth, was expected to fetch between $2 million and $4 million during the auction in New York City, according to Sotheby's. The final price was $5,296,000, which includes the hammer price, premiums and local taxes, according to the auction house. Sotheby's has not publicly identified the buyer.

Pieces of Mars found on Earth are rare. According to the auction house, just 400 of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth — or about 0.6% — are from Mars. The meteorite represents approximately 6.5% of all Martian material currently known on Earth.

Meteorites come from meteors, space rocks that enter Earth's atmosphere. Most meteors burn up as they fall toward Earth, but the ones that survive the trip through Earth's atmosphere are considered meteorites. The chunk of Martian rock that was auctioned off by Sotheby's was likely dislodged from the planet by an asteroid strike.

NWA 16788 traveled 140 million miles through space before it crashed in the Sahara Desert, where it was found in Niger's remote Agadez Region in 2023, according to Sotheby's.

"The odds of this getting from there to here are astronomically small," Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby's vice chairman of science and natural history, said in an auction house video.

The meteorite weighs just over 54 pounds, which makes it the largest meteorite from Mars, but not the largest meteorite ever found. According to NASA, a meteorite originally weighing over 100 tons once fell to Namibia.

It's believed that NWA 16788 is a "relative newcomer here on Earth, having fallen from outer space rather recently," Sotheby's said in its auction listing. The meteorite was on public view at Sotheby's New York galleries ahead of the auction on Wednesday.

"This isn't just a miraculous find, but a massive dataset that can help us unlock the secrets of our neighbor, the red planet," Hatton said in the auction house video.

Sotheby's regularly auctions meteorites.

"Specimens of the Moon and Mars are among the greatest of rarities on our planet — as every bit of both would fit in the cargo hold of a large SUV," the auction house wrote in a 2022 collector's guide.