A massive rock from Mars landed on Earth. It sold for a record $5.3M.

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A large rock broke off Mars’s surface when an asteroid struck the planet, sending it flying through space. The roughly 54-pound slab then traveled 140 million miles to Earth, where it breached the atmosphere and landed on a desert in northwest Africa.

On Wednesday, that rock sold for nearly $5.3 million at a New York City auction house.

The meteorite is the largest piece of Mars on Earth, Sotheby’s auction house said, and is now the highest selling meteorite ever.

“You get close to it, you can feel like you’re looking at the planet,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, told The Washington Post. “There’s a lot of texture and ripples and ridges and such.”

The odds of the red, brown and gray meteorite even reaching Earth were minuscule, researchers said.

The meteor probably looked like a “bright fireball” when it entered the planet, Allan Treiman, principal scientist at Houston’s Lunar and Planetary Institute, said in an email to The Post. While many rocks burn up in the atmosphere before landing on Earth, ones that reach the surface intact – like the Mars one – are called meteorites, according to NASA.

A meteorite hunter discovered the more than 14-inch-long rock in November 2023 in Niger, but there was still work to be done to confirm its origins.

A lab in China successfully tested the rock for maskelynite, a glassy material that’s commonly found in meteorites. Then, the lab found that the meteorite’s chemical composition was similar to meteorites discovered during NASA’s Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

While Sotheby’s doesn’t know when the meteorite arrived on Earth, the auction house said, it probably landed recently because it’s in good condition.

Paul Asimow, professor of geology and geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, said in an email to The Post that meteorites “carry information about the history of the Solar System that cannot be learned any other way.”

When Hatton touched the meteorite for the first time a few months ago, she said, it felt like a glossy rock.

Other meteorites from Mars have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years, but the new discovery is more than double the size of those, Hatton said.

“None of them have a presence that this had,” Hatton said. “I mean, this really looks like a piece of Mars, whereas pretty much every other Martian meteorite you see is going to just kind of look like a little rock.”

Hatton declined to identify the meteorite’s buyer.

Hatton said the public’s attention to the meteorite reflects a growing interest in space as scientists across the world explore the heavens for signs of extraterrestrial life. People teased Hatton about her interest in science two decades ago, she said, and didn’t think she could build a career selling discoveries from space.

“All of these people are coming back to me saying, ‘Oh my God, you were right all along,'” Hatton said.

So when do researchers think another large meteorite will be discovered?

“There is nothing we can do to get another,” Asimow said, “but sit around for an eternity and hope another one falls.”