  Atmospheric composition provides essential markers of the most fundamental
properties of giant exoplanets, such as their formation mechanism or internal
structure. New-generation exoplanet imagers, like VLT/SPHERE or Gemini/GPI,
have been designed to achieve very high contrast (>15 mag) at small angular
separations ($<$0.5\as) for the detection of young giant planets in the
near-infrared, but they only provide very low spectral resolutions ($R<100$)
for their characterization. High-dispersion spectroscopy at resolutions up to
$10^5$ is one of the most promising pathways for the detailed characterization
of exoplanets, but it is currently out of reach for most directly imaged
exoplanets because current high-dispersion spectrographs in the near-infrared
lack coronagraphs to attenuate the stellar signal and the spatial resolution
necessary to resolve the planet. Project HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging and
Spectroscopy of Exoplanets) ambitions to develop a demonstrator that will
combine the capabilities of two flagship instruments installed on the ESO Very
Large Telescope, the high-contrast exoplanet imager SPHERE and the
high-resolution spectrograph CRIRES+, with the goal of answering fundamental
questions on the formation, composition and evolution of young planets. In this
work, we will present the project, the first set of realistic simulations and
the preliminary design of the fiber injection unit that will be implemented in
SPHERE.
