The latest in the ever burgeoning meteorite coin market has launched and it’s from one of the big players in this genre, MCI-Mint. The German mint/coin producer has issued some fine designs over the years, including a few of the difficult to strike domed coins that are another of the current hot trends in modern numismatics. To date, MCI are the only mint to have issued meteorite coins in the 1-kilo format, and domed coins as large as five-ounces.

Never one to rest on their laurels, MCI have now issued another coin with embedded meteorite fragments, this time the Martian NWA 6963. Found in South Morocco in September 2011, when the location of the find became widely known a flood of other hunters descended on the area to search for more of it. To date, around 10kg of fragments, from 3g up to 700g have been recovered, far more than the original 83g, three piece, fusion-crusted stone that was found.

The coin is antique-finished, no surprises there, but also has some selective colouring on the reverse face, along with the small, embedded meteorite fragment. The design is well realised, the foreground meteorite spilling over the rim to enhance the layered effect, and the colour applied in the best possible way, enhancing the Red Planet so that it lives up to its name. The obverse, adorned with the Queens effigy as it’s issued for Niue, also has a textured strike to lift it out of the usual boring Niue design. The one kilo coin has the same artwork, it looks different below as that’s a render rather than an actual coin, but the obverse is much simpler, losing the cool texturing of the one ounce coin. Packaging looks decent enough; a coin box and coloured outer shipper, holding a Certificate of Authenticity.

The coin is up for sale at multiple dealers, the mints own Euromuenzhandel, the Coin Shoppe, Powercoin, Pela-Coins, First Coin Company, and Invercoin, amongst others. First Coin have a special discount on the 1kg coin; just enter 7SKU at checkout for $650.00 off the price.

Normally the desert of South Morocco is a very lonely region. But in 2012 a sandy stretch of land with no remarkable features became a tourist magnet almost over night. The reason was that the coordinates of a rare meteorite found from 2011 leaked into the public, and hundreds of meteorite hunters began to try their luck in searching for more pieces of the rock from space. Why it was sought after in such a way? The meteorite NWA 6963 was classified as Shergottite – and it is known that Shergottites are pieces of our mysterious neighboring planet, the Mars.

The red planet is named after the roman god of war, and its two moons Phobos and Deimos represent Horror and Terror. Until spacecrafts were able to make photographs of the planet’s surface many people believed that Mars was populated by an old alien race superior to humanity and expected an invasion from there someday. But the pictures revealed a dead and cold world, an icy red desert haunted by dust storms. However, the discovery of water on the planet inspire our hopes to find at least some alien microorganisms beneath the surface.NWA 6963 once had a weight of more than 8 kg. It was hurled into space by the impact of a meteorite on the surface of Mars, traveling through our solar system until our planet blocked its path.

Now a splinter of the Red Planet is incorporated into this coin. The coin, which exists in two versions of 1 ounce and 1 kilogram, is the second in the series about meteorites originating from bodies of our solar system, the first one was about the moon meteorite NWA 5000