ESPRESSO, the VLT rocky exoplanets hunter, will combine the efficiency of modern echelle spectrograph with extreme radial-velocity precision. It will be installed at Paranal on ESO's VLT in order to achieve a gain of two magnitudes with respect to its predecessor HARPS, and the instrumental radial-velocity precision will be improved to reach 10 cm

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project for a 4 meter-class ground-based telescope, to be located in the Canary Islands. The project is promoted by the European Association for Solar Telescopes (EAST), a consortium formed by research organizations from 15 European countries. EST will be optimized for studies of magnetic coupling between the

The development of adaptive optics systems for projects related to large telescopes demands a proper knowledge of the atmospheric turbulence. Due to the lack of long-term information on optical turbulence, high-altitude winds (in particular winds at the 200-mbar pressure level) were adopted as a parameter for estimating the total turbulence at a

In planar symmetry (one-dimensional peculiar motions), using the Eulerian perturbative framework and an arbitrary initial profile, we compute the analytical evolution of the peculiar velocity and the density contrast up to the fourth order (E1-E4 approximations). From these results and the exact (Lagrangian) solutions, the accuracy of the Ej (j

EURONEAR - The European Near Earth Asteroid Research is a project initiated recently by a small team presently based in France, Romania, and South Africa. It envisions to build a coordinated network which will follow-up and recover Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) and Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), using time available at 1m class telescopes in

Hera provides a robust and cost-effective means to perform a planetary defense validation test with a solid balance between risk and innovation. In the frame of the AIDA collaboration, Hera contributes to a truly international planetary defense initiative. It will bring completely new knowledge and insights on asteroid science that will be of great