After its installation at CFHT in 2018 Jan and following an extensive testing period that ended with a successful final acceptance review in 2019 Jan, SPIRou is about to initiate its scientific exploration. This includes the 300n SPIRou Legacy Survey (SLS), a quest for new worlds beyond our Solar System such as planetary systems around nearby red dwarfs like that of Trappist-1, that we want to detect and characterize, or infant stars and their planet-forming accretion discs evolving towards maturity, whose magnetized genesis we want to investigate. In this talk i will review the characteristics of SPIRou, outline its performances regarding radial velocity precision and spectropolarimetry in particular, discuss the numerous additional programmes that SPIRou can efficiently tackle beyond the SLS, and present a few results from the first science observations to be carried out in semester 2019a. I will also briefly mention follow-up projects that will usefully complement SPIRou programmes, including SPIP, the SPIRou twin in construction for TBL at Pic du Midi that will be key for improving temporal sampling in monitoring surveys, and MARSU, a CubeSat aimed at carrying out continuous infrared photometry simultaneously with SPIRou/SPIP for selected targets.
