MONSARAZ, PORTUGAL – 30 June 2025 – The silence was broken by cheers and the snap of camera shutters as nine European high school students stepped out of a simulated Mars environment in Portugal, successfully completing the first-of-its-kind EXPLORE analog mission. From 23 to 27 June 2025, these students from Austria, Greece, and Portugal traded their everyday lives for a challenging five-day immersion in an isolated, Mars-like landscape near Monsaraz, in the wilds of the Alentejo province.

Based on the theory of coherent inverse Compton scattering, researchers have proposed a novel scheme for generating high-intensity extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and soft X-ray light beams. In this scheme, specially designed structured light fields, featuring periodic patterns in both space and time, are used to interact with high-energy electron beams. This interaction leads to inverse Compton scattering, where the scattered photons possess higher energy than the incident ones. Due to the periodic structure of the structured light fields, the scattering process becomes coherent rather than incoherent, resulting in significantly enhanced efficiency. This approach holds great potential as a powerful and efficient solution for advanced applications requiring intense EUV and soft X-ray radiation.