SHARK-NIR on its way to LBT

SHARK-NIR is a high contrast camera for the LBT, spanning the Y, J and H bands. It has been designed to fully exploit the high Strehl adaptive optics correction delivered by the FLAO module, recently upgraded to SOUL, and implements different coronagraphic techniques, with contrast as high as 10-6 up to 65 mas from the star. It also has spectroscopical capabilities, with low and medium resolution, and its relatively wide Field of View (18 x 18 arcsec) makes it accessible to other scientific targets, such as galactic jets and disks, as well as extra-galactic cases.The nature of the instrument, requiring deep exploration of stars very close neighborhood, translates into the requirements of extreme delivered optical quality and stability, ideally not to degrade the exquisite correction performed by SOUL. To improve its performance, SHARK-NIR includes a couple of peculiar features, such as a fast internal TT loop to minimize the residual jitter and a local NCPA correction, performed through a DM inside the instrument itself. SHARK-NIR will be mounted at a gravity variant focal station, thus it has to cope with flexures, whose effects could kill the coronagraphic performance. To minimize the effect of flexures, SHARK-NIR is a very compact and stiff instrument, whose flexures have been characterized during a dedicated campaign in laboratory, where the whole instrument was mounted on a dedicated handling simulating different telescope elevations. We report here the main results of the flexures tests and of the AIV phase, ended at the beginning of 2022..