BETHEL — Director Barbra Barrett was set to unveil the newest prized addition to the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum on Tuesday when the black cloth covering the largest intact piece of Mars on Earth suddenly flew off before she could say a few words.

The out-of-this-world specimen demonstrated that the Martian soil may, indeed, contain a little magic.

Known as Taoudenni 002, the 32-pound meteorite found in Mali in West Africa continues the museum’s vast collection of extraterrestrial rocks, with more than 6,000 from the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt.

With the addition — the meteorite measures 10 inches by 9 inches by 6½ inches — the museum’s collection also contains the largest piece of the moon, the largest piece of the asteroid Vesta and the oldest igneous rock in the solar system at 4.5 billion years old.

How does this museum in this small Maine town house such a collection of meteorites, including the largest collection of Martian rocks?

An avid collector through the years, museum founder Larry Stifler said people seek out his facility to offer prized  interstellar rocks from throughout the world.

The Taoudenni 002 was obtained from renowned meteorite dealer Darryl Pitt, who has helped Stifler obtain most of his space collection. Pitt acquired the latest rock in April 2021 from a Mauritanian meteorite and desert truffle hunter who found the rock in Mali. Believing it was a piece of Mars, Pitt sent a small piece of the rock to the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, which confirmed the Martian connection through the comparison of chemical and isotopic markers.

The Mars rock contains pyroxene, olivine and maskelynite.

R. Aileen Yingst of Brunswick, a NASA scientist with the Mars Exploration Program, said the meteorites can be traced to Mars by the small pockets of gas bubbles in the rock that matched the Martian atmosphere discovered by the Viking space probes from the 1990s.

While the Bethel meteorite is considered the largest intact Martian rock on Earth, it was not the largest Martian rock ever found. In 1962, the Zagami meteorite was discovered in Nigeria weighing more than 40 pounds, but that has since been cut into smaller pieces, according to a NASA report. No other larger Martian rock is known to exist.

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