Videos The largest chunk of Mars yet discovered on Earth, a 54-pound (25kg) chunk of the Red Planet, has been purchased at auction for $5.3 million by an unknown bidder.
The meteorite, dubbed NWA 16788, was discovered in the Sahara Desert on July 16, 2023, and is thought to have been blasted off the Martian surface by an impact from another meteorite. It then travelled 140 million miles before partially burning up in our atmosphere and landing on the ground – a lucky shot for us humans, given around 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is water.
It’s thought that only the largest 19 space rock strikes on Mars, as detectible through the size of the impact craters, would have been powerful enough to send the sample back to Earth. The rock, measuring 375 x 279 x 152 mm (14¾ x 11 x 6 inches) and weighing 24.67 kilograms (54 pounds), was checked by boffins in China and Italy to make sure it’s the real deal, using data collected by the Viking Mars landers on the chemical composition of the planet’s rocks.
The sample makes up more than 6 percent of all the Martian material yet found on Earth, of which we’ve collected around 400 samples so far. Unfortunately the rock wasn’t bought by a scientific institution, but a private collector. Therefore, it’s unlikely that scientists will be core drilling it to find out more about the geology of the Elon Musk’s favorite planet.
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NASA has already started collecting samples from Mars, using the Perseverance rover that’s drilling into the surface using specially designed equipment, and storing them for an eventual return to Earth. That, however, requires funding – something NASA is critically short of at the moment.
Also on the auction block was a dinosaur skeleton that went for an astonishing $26 million. It was a juvenile of the Ceratosaurus genus, a meat-eating dinosaur smaller than a T-Rex that roamed the Earth in the late Jurassic period. The sale led to some frantic bidding, something Brusatte commented would lead to another loss for science. ®