Lessons learned from NEAR for high-contrast imaging of exoplanets with ELT METIS

The New Earths in the Alpha Cen Region campaign is a 100-h imaging search for massive rocky planets in the habitable zone of the two stars of Alpha Cen. The program is a collaboration between the Breakthrough Initiatives and ESO and was launched in 2016. To achieve the challenging goal of NEAR, the VLT MIR instrument VISIR was upgraded and installed at UT4 to couple it with the Adaptive Optics Facility. The University of Liege provided an optimized vortex coronagraph and a dedicated pointing control procedure. After a successful commissioning in April and May 2019, the campaign was completed in May-June 2019. It generated >6 TB of data, which are available to the community. The data were analyzed by the NEAR collaboration. I will present the science context of the project, simulated and on-sky results of the performance of the vortex coronagraph, the lessons learned for high-contrast imaging with ELT METIS, and prospects for imaging Earth-mass planets around Alpha Cen.