Astrophysics from the Moon—Composition and structure of planetary atmospheres

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We consider uses of observatories on the Moon for addressing problems in composition and structure of planetary atmospheres. The focus is on the science which can be uniquely done from the Moon or, at least, best done from the Moon. These fall into three categories, phenomena close to the solar direction, phenomena requiring removal from the near‐Earth environment for observation (e.g., phenomena requiring continuous time coverage over time scales of hours, observations required outside the magnetosphere, and observations required away from the geocorona), and phenomena not observable from the Earth’s surface which require very large telescopes or interferometric arrays.