Planetary and space science special issue

Abstract

Today more than ever, space science is a vibrant and exciting field. The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover took off and landed at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the scientific results of its payload are already paying dividends to the scientific community. Meanwhile on Earth, scientific development, far from having halted, remains as active as ever before, albeit with some hiccups over the last 3 years due to restrictions. Nevertheless, the scientific community, and more specifically, the space science community, has remained steadfast in its pursuit of knowledge. And at the core of this pursuit is the ever-growing field of chemometrics.This special issue, published in the Journal of Chemometrics, coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. We had our twists and turns, yet the work that has emerged over the last 3 years is nothing short of extraordinary. Tremendous talent has filled the pages of this issue, ranging from reviews of the literature to cutting edge methods at the intersection of chemometrics and space science. The papers in this collection offer insight into selected experiments in spectroscopy and chemometrics, highlighting selected findings for space exploration. They are organized as follows. A Raman spectroscopy-compositional-structural investigation of lunar surface materials and analogues 3This study focuses on the investigation of Raman spectroscopy of 35 lunar-relevant rock and mineral samples, including pyroxenes, olivine, plagioclase feldspars, and oxides. By analyzing the Raman spectra in relation to their compositional and structural properties, the research developed strong correlations for detecting these minerals on the lunar surface. A spectral deconvolution program was developed and implemented to model the fluorescence background and extract Raman peak positions. Specific correlations were discovered between the Raman peak positions and the compositions of pyroxenes and olivines. The study also explored the Raman signatures of plagioclase and oxides. The established