Synthetic Plagioclases as Support for Future “In-Situ” Missions: Iron's influence on VNIR Reflectance VNIR Reflectance of Synthetic Plagioclase

Abstract

Plagioclase feldspars are rock-forming minerals which can be detected in the VNIR reflectance spectroscopy due to the presence of low amount of iron in their crystal lattice. Nevertheless the correlation between the spectral properties and the plagioclase compositions are still not deeply investigated. In this paper we propose an experimental procedure that succeeds to produce synthetic plagioclase with variable amount of iron. We analyze the VNIR spectral variability for synthetic An90 with different iron abundance and we compare our results with previous data-sets.