The auction house Sotheby’s has offered a new way to get a piece of Mars without entrusting your life to Elon Musk, who has pledged to send people to Mars by 2029: Buying a piece of it instead. A 54-pound rock that’s believed to be the largest piece of Mars to ever crash to Earth will go on sale Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. The piece broke off from Mars after an asteroid strike hit the planet, shooting the fragment 140 million miles toward Earth, where it crashed in the Sahara desert. A man found the piece in Niger in November 2023, though it’s unknown when it landed. The meteorite is 70 percent larger than the next-largest Mars rock on the planet, and it represents 7 percent of every bit of Mars on Earth. “This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, the vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, told the AP. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.” It’s expected to fetch between $2 million and $4 million.
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