This specific equipment will allow to carry out tests in cryogenics and high vacuum conditions of large electro-opto-mechanical systems. The first instrument that will benefit from this infrastructure will be HARMONI, the optical spectrograph / IR developed by ESO as first light instrument for the future Extremely Large European Telescope (ELT)

PLATO 2.0 (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillation of stars) will the the 3rd medium class mission (M3) of the Cosmic Vision scientific programme of the European Space Agency. It was selected in February 2014, and just adopted in June 2017, with a launch date planned for 202 6 and six years of operations. PLATO 2.0 will place European researchers, and

High Resolution stable spectrographs, coupled to large-size telescopes such as VLT or GTC, will allow us to extract in detail the dynamical and chemical information of stars across the Milky Way. The ESPRESSO spectrograph, in whose Science Team the PIs are involved, and which will be installed at the VLT in Winter 2017, will allows us to discover

Black-holes and neutron stars are extremely important astrophysical objects, which become unique laboratories of extreme physics when found within X-ray binaries. Their study provides high-impact results, which are relevant for many astrophysics and fundamental physics areas. Our project target fundamental properties of both the accretion process

Asteroids are considered the residual building blocks that formed the planets: a window to the formation and evolution of our solar system. Primitive asteroids (PAs) are characterized by dark surfaces dominated by carbon compounds and are associated to carbonaceous chondrites (CCs), the most pristine meteorites in our records. Both PAs and CCs are