A PIECE OF THE MOON
A Brief History of the Moon, and one small piece of it, now on Earth.
Four and a half billion years ago, a body the size of Mars struck the young Earth. The collision threw a vast cloud of molten rock into orbit. Gravity drew it together. It cooled. It rounded. It became the Moon.
For billions of years that followed, the Moon was hammered — asteroids striking its surface, shattering the crust, mixing minerals under enormous heat and pressure, welding them back together. The highlands formed. The craters multiplied. A landscape unlike anything on Earth slowly hardened into permanence.
At some point, another impact tore a fragment of that crust free — no longer part of its home, a rock, tumbling through space. It drifted. It crossed into Earth's orbit. It fell — landing in the Saharan desert of Mali, where it lay in the dust.
Until it was found.
That stone was Tisserlitine 006.
THE COLLECTIVE WEIGHT OF EVERY METEORITE KNOWN TO EXIST IS LESS THAN THE WORLD'S ANNUAL OUTPUT OF GOLD.
Of that total, lunar material is rarer still — only 1,536 kilograms confirmed, roughly the weight of a compact car, and just 0.6% of all known meteorites. No lunar meteorite has ever been found in Europe, North America or South America. They reach us almost exclusively through the world's great deserts and polar ice fields — unannounced, unwitnessed, and alone in the dust.
The Apollo missions brought back 382 kilograms more. Those belong permanently to governments.
What remains in private hands is what fell.
1,536 KG: THE TOTAL KNOWN WEIGHT OF EVERY LUNAR METEORITE.
ROUGHLY THE WEIGHT OF A COMPACT CAR.
From Tisserlitine 006, a sphere was cut.
Most lunar spheres that come to market measure under 40 millimeters and weigh less than 100 grams. The source stones large enough to produce anything larger are vanishingly rare, and shaping them into spheres is among the most demanding feats of lapidary craftsmanship. Precision machinery, skilled hands, and the constant knowledge that a single crack ends everything. Rounded, grey and richly layered—like the world it came from.
This sphere measures 105 millimeters and weighs 1,687 grams.
THE SECOND-LARGEST LUNAR SPHERE KNOWN TO EXIST
The sphere's surface holds two timescales at once. The dark grey brecciated interior — mineral clasts suspended in a vesicular matrix — is the record of an ancient impact on the Moon's surface, on terrain composed of anorthosite, the light grey rock that forms the lunar highlands.
Billions of years of lunar geology. The Saharan dust. One sphere — a microcosm of the world it came from.
LUNAR METEORITE: TISSERLITINE 006 IS AVAILABLE FOR PRIVATE SALE