Solar radiation balances significantly affect Earth's surface energy balance and climate change. Studying top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) albedo changes is of great significance for understanding Earth's energy budget and atmospheric circulation. The Loess Plateau (LP), located in the middle reaches of the Yellow River in China, is one of the most severely eroded areas in the world. In this paper, long-term remote sensing data were used to analyze the changes in the TOA albedo in the LP from 1982 to 2016. The results showed that the TOA albedo, its atmospheric contribution (AC), and surface contribution (SC) exhibited decreasing trends: -0.0012, -0.0010, and -0.0003 a-1. The spatial pattern of the TOA albedo was similar to AC, which indicates that AC dominates the change in the TOA albedo. We detected driving factors for AC and SC and found that the cloud fraction (CF) was the main driving factor of the AC, whereas the soil moisture (SM) dominated the SC. The driving factors of two typical regions with a significantly decreasing trend in the TOA albedo were also detected. The Mu Us Desert, where vegetation improved significantly, showed a decreasing trend in the TOA albedo, and we found that NDVI was the main driving factor for the change in the SC of the TOA albedo. However, the Eastern Qilian Mountains, where snow cover decreased in recent years, also showed a significant decreasing trend in the TOA albedo; the SC here was mainly driven by the changes in snow cover days (SCD). These results indicate that changes in the surface environment alter the radiation balance. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: The Loess Plateau in China is one of the most severe cases of soil erosion in the world, and ecological restoration projects have been carried out to recover the fragile ecological environment. Our study was designed to explore changes in the top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) albedo of the Loess Plateau between 1982 and 2016 using a long time series of multisource satellite products, and driving factors in the atmosphere and at the surface were analyzed. We concluded that the TOA albedo of the Loess Plateau decreased over 35 years, and its atmospheric contribution dominated the change in the TOA albedo. However, the significant ecological improvement in the Loess Plateau, especially in the central vegetation recovery region, such as the Mu Us Desert, was also strongly related to the regional changes in the surface contribution of the TOA albedo. The climate changes had a considerable impact on the eastern branch of the Qilian Mountains in the Qinghai region, where the decline in snow cover days affected the local Alpine meadow ecosystems; therefore, snow cover days also played a decisive role in the local variation of the surface contribution of the TOA albedo.

In this chapter, we review the contribution of space missions to the determination of the elemental and isotopic composition of Earth, Moon and the terrestrial planets, with special emphasis on currently planned and future missions. We show how these missions are going to significantly contribute to, or sometimes revolutionise, our understanding of planetary evolution, from formation to the possible emergence of life. We start with the Earth, which is a unique habitable body with actual life, and that is strongly related to its atmosphere. The new wave of missions to the Moon is then reviewed, which are going to study its formation history, the structure and dynamics of its tenuous exosphere and the interaction of the Moon's surface and exosphere with the different sources of plasma and radiation of its environment, including the solar wind and the escaping Earth's upper atmosphere. Missions to study the noble gas atmospheres of the terrestrial planets, Venus and Mars, are then examined. These missions are expected to trace the evolutionary paths of these two noble gas atmospheres, with a special emphasis on understanding the effect of atmospheric escape on the fate of water. Future missions to these planets will be key to help us establishing a comparative view of the evolution of climates and habitability at Earth, Venus and Mars, one of the most important and challenging open questions of planetary science. Finally, as the detection and characterisation of exoplanets is currently revolutionising the scope of planetary science, we review the missions aiming to characterise the internal structure and the atmospheres of these exoplanets.