Discovery of coesite on the Moon

Asteroid impact is a common process in the Solar System. The high pressures and temperatures created by the shock events cause the target minerals transforming to more stable polymorphs, high-pressure minerals. Thus, high-pressure minerals, in turn, are widely used to constrain the shock events happened on Earth, Mars, and the Moon. Here we investigated the shock metamorphism of the lunar soils returned by the Chang’e-6 (CE6) mission from the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin and first reported the discovery of coesite, a high-pressure polymorph of silica, in a mare basalt fragment.