Jerome Apt Status: Retired 4/28/1949 – Nationality: American Type: Government Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jerome “Jay” Apt III, Ph.D. (born April 28, 1949 in Massachusetts) is an American astronaut and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Before he became an astronaut, Apt was a physicist who worked on the Pioneer Venus 1978 space probe project, and used visible light and infrared techniques to study the planets and moons of the solar system from ground-based observatories.