Legend: Red Planet

Description

The Avantist Legend Series is a line of watches that contain legendary pieces of history and materials meant to inspire its wearer every time they tell the time. Created to honour legendary athletes, world leaders and icons, our past pieces have contained string from grand-slam-winning tennis racquets to fabric from the flags flown at the coronation of kings.

This year we introduce something truly out of this world: dials inlaid with rock from the surface of Mars and the Moon.

Red Planet is our model with a dial inlaid with Martian meteorite, recovered in Northwest Africa in 2018 and classified by the Meteoritical Society in its Meteoritical Bulletin Database as NWA 13257. One of only 395 known Martian meteorites, NWA 13257 is a diabasic shergottite exhibiting maskelynite, pigeonite and augite crystals — features formed by the immense impact that ejected the meteorite from Mars and brought it to Earth.

To produce the dials we first cut the meteorite into extremely thin slices, less than half a millimetre thick, and intentionally cracked them along their natural fault lines, then set the slices into the dial with Super-LumiNova used as inlay along the cracks — a difficult and uncommon method, developed specifically for this watch.

Under daylight the charcoal sunray dial focuses into a diamond-shaped island of white, set with fragments of Mars. In darkness, this island of Super-LumiNova is transformed: glowing a fiery amber through the fractures, as if it were radiating cosmic energy.

The diamond-shaped island, framed by a circular ring of dotted luminous hour markers, represents planets and moons orbiting their parent body. This motif is carried throughout the design of the watch — at the caseback engraving, the caseback window, and the deployant clasp. The closed clasp brings the same form home to the underside of the wrist.

The case is in titanium, while the bracelet and bezel are in stainless steel. The choice to mix materials is one of balance — steel is heavier than titanium, and a single-material build would put more mass at the case than at the bracelet. Distributing the heavier metal this way positions the centre of mass in the middle of the wrist for the ideal wrist-feel.

The meteorite samples are from the personal collection of Avantist founder Keeran Janin, acquired from Adrian Contreras. Each watch contains between 0.5 and 1.0 gram of Martian meteorite — the largest amount in a production series watch of any price range.

The hands and indices are in rose gold. The movement is the ETA 2892-A2: hours, minutes, seconds, and a date at three o’clock. Red Planet is one of fifty pieces in the Legend Series, designed and manufactured by Avantist with Roventa-Henex in Tavannes.

References

The Meteoritical Society — meteoritical.org

Meteoritical Bulletin Database, NWA 13257 — lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?code=71735

Supplied by the brand to the GPHG for its entry.