{"id":14453,"date":"2025-07-16T19:00:04","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T19:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/14453\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T19:00:04","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T19:00:04","slug":"largest-chunk-of-mars-on-earth-sells-for-5-3-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/14453\/","title":{"rendered":"Largest chunk of Mars on Earth sells for $5.3 million"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cLargest Piece of Mars on Earth\u201d just sold at auction for about $5.3 million\u2014 $5,296,000, to be exact<\/a>. Popular Science has reached out to Sotheby\u2019s for confirmation of the sale price.<\/p>\n

The 54-pound rock measures roughly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches. It was part of a Sotheby\u2019s natural history auction<\/a> that also included a juvenile Ceratosaurus dinosaur skeleton<\/a> and a lunar meteorite.<\/p>\n

The meteorite is believed to have been blown off the surface of Mars<\/a> 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<\/a>. However, it is not completely clear when the meteorite hit Earth. Testing shows that the strike probably happened in recent years, according to Sotheby\u2019s. It previously was on exhibit at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby\u2019s did not disclose the space rock\u2019s previous owner.<\/p>\n

The red, brown and gray rock is roughly 70 percent larger<\/a> 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a big, orbital donut full of battered bits of Mars,\u00a0 launched by cratering events,\u00a0 and the Earth clearly intercepts that stream all the time,\u201d Ralph Harvey, a geochemist who studies plenary materials at Case Western University, tells Popular Science. \u201cThere\u2019s really no substitute for \u201cground truth,\u201d and the Martian meteorites represent the only known samples from that planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cassandra Hatton, the vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby\u2019s, told the Associated Press<\/a> that this Martian meteorite<\/a> was confirmed to be from the Red Planet in a specialized lab. The sample\u2019s chemical make up was compared with Martian meteorites that were discovered in 1967, when the Viking space probe<\/a> landed on Mars.<\/p>\n

The official examination found that the now sold rock is an olivine-microgabbroic shergottite<\/a>. This type of Martian rock was formed by the slow cooling of magma on Mars. Sotheby\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot more rocks falling to Earth from space than most people realize;\u00a0 the total mass of meteoritic material is a few tens of thousands of tons per year,\u201d says Harvey. \u201cFrom that, maybe 10-20,000 bits will actually be rocks that hit the Earth\u2019s surface. It\u2019s the equivalent of a softball-sized rock each million square kilometers, and distributed very randomly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The \u201cLargest Piece of Mars on Earth\u201d just sold at auction for about $5.3 million\u2014 $5,296,000, to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[13868,196,10561,6652,13869,13867,79,198,193],"class_list":["post-14453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-lunar-meteorite","tag-mars","tag-martian-meteorites","tag-meteorite-hunter","tag-popular-science","tag-ralph-harvey","tag-science","tag-sothebys","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}