On October 21, 2019, with the support of Founder and CEO of Reseptron, Leyla Taghizade and US Embassy, NASA speaker and an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia, Prof. Anne Verbiscer, delivered a session at UFAZ to further promote and engage women participation in Space industry.

Prof. Dr. Anne Verbiscer has indeed played throughout her scientific career an important role in several of NASA’s research projects, including the exploration of Saturn.

Elaborating on NASA New Horizons Mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, Prof. Dr. Verbiscer introduced the audience with the historical overview of how Pluto was discovered in the first place in 1929. She underlined that until 2006, knowledge collected about Pluto was very limited. By then the term planet was formally defined: it thus excluded Pluto and rather reclassified it as a dwarf planet.

Prof. Dr. Verbiscer also shared insights on the essential role of Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons Spacecraft in the discovery of Pluto and the Kuiper belt – a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System in which Pluto is located. New Horizons was the first-ever spacecraft performing a flyby of Pluto and during its brief flyby, the spacecraft made detailed measurements and observations of Pluto and its moons.

Besides external guests, US Embassy Cultural Affairs Officer Richard Pinkham, Leyla Taghizade, Founder and CEO of Reseptron, UFAZ Administration and UFAZ students attended the lecture.

NASA speaker Anne Verbiscer is an associate research professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. She received her doctorate in Planetary Science from Cornell University. Dr. Verbiscer participates in the Cassini Mission exploration of Saturn through her work with the Cassini Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) Instrument Team, Cassini Satellite Orbiter Science Team (SOST), and Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) Instrument Team. She has been the principal investigator on two NASA Cassini Data Analysis Program research projects intended to investigate the surface properties of Enceladus.

She was invited to Azerbaijan as a NASA speaker from the U.S., to participate in the NASA SpaceApp Challenge 2019 organized in partnership with Azercosmos, New Space Accelerator  and ADA University on October 18-20.