Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Planetary Surfaces: An Insight into Composition of Inner Planets and Small Bodies in the Solar System

Space exploration missions of planetary bodies in our solar system have provided new insights to understand their formation and evolutionary processes that such bodies have undergone leading to their current geological state. Remote sensing from orbiter mission has helped in identifying surface features, delineating surface topography, mapping surface composition and deriving reliable age estimates of different planetary surfaces. In particular, high spatial and spectral resolution spacecraft observations have significantly contributed to our current understanding of the geological, physical and chemical processes that resulted in divergent evolutionary paths undertaken by different planetary objects such as inner and outer planets, dwarf planets, the moons and small solar system bodies (asteroids and comets). Hyperspectral remote sensing has been an emerging field of space-based reflectance spectroscopy and in recent years many imaging spectroscopy instruments have flown on different planetary missions, e.g. Moon Mineralogy Mapper on-board Chandrayaan-1, VIMS on Cassini mission, CRISM on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission, etc. This article provides a review on imaging reflectance spectroscopy for understanding the surface composition through mineralogy for different planetary bodies.