###### Abstract
The interest in the presence of water above or below the crust of planetary bodies, in different states of aggregation (solid or liquid), has motivated the study of hydrated minerals and their evolution at different pressures and temperatures to assess the possible storage or release of liquid water [35]. In some cases, the evolution of mineral spectra at high and low temperatures and the effect of grain size were analyzed [32; 36]. The spectra of hypothetical mineralogical mixtures are then interpolated with remote sensing data to decipher the composition of planetary soils. However, the spectrum of a planetary surface (like the Earth's) is the result of the sum of several mineralogical/amorphous phases with different physical and textural properties. Therefore, a much more complex spectrum than that of a single phase or component is obtained. In this perspective, the conceptualization and construction of the _Exoland_ device aims at implementing spectral libraries of rocks and minerals with a series of reflectance spectra in the 0.38-2.2 um range with a different and progressive degree of complexity, from a single mineral composition to a series of different rock composition mixes, considering different physical parameters such as grain size and/or temperature. This approach will make it possible to assess the effect of variations of multiple components on individual spectral bands for a better and more accurate remote identification of the selected materials and, finally, to identify which bands and spectral ranges are the most diagnostic and influenced by different physical-chemical properties. A prior work in the scientific literature reports the conceptualization and study of an automated test rig for spectral analyses of soil analogs [37]. In this prior paper, a laboratory goniometer system for the assessment of the anisotropic reflectance and emittance behavior of soils was presented. This system is based on a commercially available robotic arm to collect measurements over the full hemisphere, performing multi-angular measurements under controlled illumination. The arm has a spectrometer and a thermal camera mounted on it, and these allow the acquisition of either hemispherical measurements or measurements in the horizontal plane. Another goniometer system was presented in [38]. Different from the prior work, the test rig proposed in the present paper exploits a different geometrical measuring approach by using a Cartesian robot and four moving axes: three sliding ones and a rotating one. In addition, a heating system is included to change the temperature of the samples on the worktable. Vis-NIR spectroscopy being a rapid, user-friendly, and non-destructive technique, it is used also in many industrial fields and applied sciences such as tribology [39; 40; 41], product and quality control [42; 43], the food industry [44; 45], the study of fertilizers [46], chemistry [47], and the pharmaceutical industry [48]. Regarding the use of visible and/or infrared spectroscopy in tribology, the main applications relate to the study and tribological characterization of lubricants and oils [39; 40] or thin films [41] to the optimization of the lubrication and vibration behavior in tribological joints as bearings [49]. This technique is also useful for studying the wear scars on the mating surfaces of a tribological pair to analyze the wear behavior, the wear mechanism, and the presence of particles or impurities at the interface. This can be performed both for industrial tribological pairs and for human joints or prostheses, such as knee or hip joints [50]. Another application can deal with the study of the compounds on worn surfaces that cannot be attributed directly to the wear progress, but derive from different phenomena. From this perspective, the automated simulator proposed in this paper can be advantageously used for tribological purposes both on tribological pairs and on different materials as liquid or solid lubricants and ground soil samples.