A 54-pound Martian rock, known as NWA 16788, fetched a record $5.3 million at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive meteorite ever sold at auction.

A 54-pound meteorite from Mars sold for more than $5 million when it went up for auction on Wednesday at Sotheby's.

"While robotic missions to Mars continue to shed light on the planet's history, the only samples from Mars available for study on Earth are Martian meteorites," Lauren White, a systems engineer at NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory said in 2014.