  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.
