LOCNES: a solar telescope to study stellar activity in the near infrared

LOCNES (LOw-Cost NIR Extended Solar telescope) is a solar telescope installed at the TNG (Telescopio Nazionale Galileo). It feeds the light of the Sun into the NIR spectrograph GIANO-B through a 40-m patch of optical fibers. LOCNES has been designed to obtain high signal-to-noise ratio spectra of the Sun as a star with an accurate wavelength calibration through molecular-band cells. This is an entirely new area of investigation that will provide timely results to improve the search of telluric planets with NIR spectrographs such as iSHELL, CARMENES, and GIANO-B. We will extract several disc-integrated activity indicators and average magnetic field measurements for the Sun in the NIR. Eventually, they will be correlated with both the RV of the Sun-as-a -star and the resolved images of the solar disc in visible and NIR. Such an approach will allow for a better understanding of the origin of activity-induced RV variations in the two spectral domains and will help in improving the techniques for their corrections. In this paper, we outline the science drivers for the LOCNES project and its first commissioning results.