The PANGAEA mineralogical database
Description
Future human missions to the surface of the Moon and Mars will involve scientific exploration requiring new support tools to enable rapid and high quality science decision-making. Here, we provide the PANGAEA Mineralogical Database developed by the European Space Agency: a catalog of petrographic and spectroscopic information on all currently known minerals identified on the Moon Mars, and associated with meteorites. It also includes minerals found in the ESA PANGAEA analog sites to broaden the database coverage. The Mineralogical Database is composed primarly of the Summary Catalog of of Planetary Analog Minerals and the Spectral Archive. The Summary Catalog provides essential descriptive information for each mineral, including name (based on IMA recommendation), chemical formula, mineral group, surface abundance on planetary bodies, geological significance in the context of planetary exploration, number of collected VNIR and Raman spectra, likelihood of detection using different spectral methods, and bibliographic references evidencing their detection in extraterrestrial or terrestrial analog environments. The Spectral Archive provides a standard library for planetary in-situ human and robotic exploration covering Visual-Near-Infrared reflective (VNIR) and Raman spectroscopy (Raman). To populate this library, we collected VNIR and Raman spectra for mineral entries in the Summary Catalog from open-access archives, and analyzed them to select the best. We also supplemented this collection with our own bespoke measurements. Additionally, we compiled the chemical compositions for all minerals based on their empirical formula, to allow identification using the measured abundances provided by LIBS and XRF analytical instruments. This version of the PANGAEA Mineralogical Database available here in Mendeley Data is updated to the 8th of June 2020. Any further update can be downloaded directly from the ESA webpage https://atd.eac.esa.int/sites/PANGAEAMinDB where the newest versions will be stored.