PREP-EST is a project funded by the Canary Islands Government under a direct grant awarded on grounds of public interest. The objective of PREP-EST is the realization of the preliminary design of systems and subsystems of the telescope to a sufficient level that allows starting the detailed design stage and, in a next phase, the beginning of the

In the last two decades, Spain has built up a strong infrared community which have successfully contributed, at Co-I level, to the construction and to the scientific exploitation of basically all European InfraRed (IR) space instruments. The IAC has contributed to the construction of infrared instruments for the space telescopes ISO (ISOPHOT-S) and

Multiple communities are now interested in NEOs for very different reasons ranging from science to planetary defence and commercial objectives (e.g., mining). Given the shared scientific and technological basis, all of these communities require knowledge and modelling capabilities of asteroid properties, as well as the capability to perform close

One of the unresolved issues in astrophysics and astrochemistry is to understand how prebiotic molecules assemble into complex structures and establish which ones are the necessary conditions for life to arise and evolve on Earth and in the exoplanets. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, constituents essential to all organisms and

The identification of active regions in the far-side of the Sun by analyzing the oscillations on the Earth-side is one of the most impressive results from local helioseismology. The interest in the detection of active regions in the farside goes beyond the simple curiosity of measuring them before they rotate into the visible hemisphere. Due to the

Based on statistics provided by the Kepler space mission and searches performed with Doppler techniques, super-Earth and Earth-like exoplanets (Rp ~ 0.8-2 times the Earth radius) could exist in about 10-20% of the Sun-like stars and potentially in more than 50% of the stars smaller than the Sun. Despite this, we still do not know which stars in the