Europa, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, is one of the most fascinating planetary bodies in our solar system. A salty, liquid water ocean beneath its surface is a promising environment to explore in order to answer one of the fundamental questions in science for us Earthlings: Are we alone? Has life evolved independently elsewhere? While the path forward in the exploration of Europa should hopefully reach a stage where we can explore the ocean directly using deep sea explorers, akin to oceanography on Earth, in these early stages of exploring Europa we rely on remote sensing to study this icy moon and constrain its habitability. Europa's surface is young, with few craters and geological evidence of surface-ocean exchange. Hence the surface composition of Europa provides a window to its subsurface ocean's composition. Of special interest therefore, are regions on Europa's surface where the surface material is likely 'endogenic': fresh deposits of material that have extruded onto the surface and yet to be fully altered by the intense, high-energy irradiation environment of Jupiter. The problem of characterizing the composition of these surface deposits, especially trace species of interest to the question of habitability, like organics, is challenging. Many candidate species have been proposed to explain the bulk composition of Europa's surface, but ambiguity remains over exact identification. Europa's low reflectance in the near-infrared wavelength regime, especially beyond ~ 2 microns, complicates the identification and characterization of species like organics which, despite being spectroscopically rich in this wavelength region, are expected to have inherently weak signals in the reflectance spectra due to trace abundances. Finally, the spectroscopic features of surface species can be affected by other factors apart from abundance, like the average grain-size and porosity of the planetary regolith, and the observation geometry, and degeneracies between these parameters cannot be ignored. This thesis paves a new way forward for spectroscopic characterization of Europa's surface, introducing a framework that can help answer two fundamental questions about the surface composition: 1) Is there significant evidence for a species in the presence of all possible candidates, allowing for the effects of non-abundance parameters? 2) If there is significant evidence for the presence of a species, then what is its abundance and what are the confidence intervals on that value? A systematic approach that uses these two questions as guide stones for spectroscopic data analysis can help resolve fundamental debates about composition and confidently detect weak signals of trace species on Europa surface. In this thesis, I introduce such a framework, called FROSTIE, and demonstrate its capabilities in three chapters. Firstly, FROSTIE was used to get the first estimate of abundances of amorphous and crystalline forms of water ice on Europa's surface from data collected by the Juno spacecraft, which is of immense consequence as overabundance of crystalline ice is a potential marker for fresh deposits on Europa's surface. Next, FROSTIE permitted a revisit of Galileo spectra of Europa, in their most comprehensive analysis of yet that included the first use of an empirical parameter to account for irradiation-induced spectroscopic shift, demonstrating that there is still a lot to be learned from the Galileo data. Finally, FROSTIE was also applied to assess the feasibility of the promises that the Europa Clipper mission holds, especially when it comes to detecting and characterizing trace organics via remote sensing. The novel framework presented to carry out this assessment can be immensely useful in planning future observations and instruments for exploration of planetary surfaces in the solar system. A fundamental goal that was decided upon as the development of FROSTIE started was to ensure its availability and accessibility to the wider planetary science community. To that end, FROSTIE will be released as an open-source research software package, extensively documented and driven by tutorials, so that many more can participate in accelerating our understanding of Europa's surface composition and habitability.