Chris Gerty

Program Specialist @ NASA Headquarters

Chris is an advocate of NASA’s Open Government Initiative and is a leading voice on the concept of participatory exploration and collaboration. He has fifteen years of experience working on complex, technology-intense projects at NASA. Chris has a passion for technology both personally and professionally, and has worked on projects ranging from planning human missions to the Moon, to specializing in the operation of US and Russian space suit systems on the International Space Station. Chris is also an explorer and has firsthand experience working and surviving in extreme conditions. In 2007, he participated as a crew member on NASA's undersea mission aboard the NOAA Aquarius Underwater Laboratory off the coast of Florida, living underwater for 10 days to study the effects of long-duration spaceflight and test lunar exploration concepts. Chris earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY, and currently lives in Houston, TX with his family.

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Latest Posts by Gerty

A Standing Army of Virtual Aquanauts

| We need to thank the hundreds of people who took the time to create a Zooniverse account (or use their existing one) to help classify features on the reef.  It’s been just over a week that the NEEMO-Zooniverse platform (designed by Vizzuality) has been in active beta testing, and we are really excited in the [...]

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Crowdsourcing Science at NEEMO-15

| Got plans for the next decade? NASA does.  The agency would like to send a crew to visit an asteroid, and we’re not going alone.  In addition to being open to partnerships that will leverage the skills of space agencies and corporations across the planet, NASA is looking at new ways to collectively leverage expertise [...]

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Collaborating Virtually in a Physical World

| Collaborative spaces sure are popular these days.  Personally, I’ve learned to love working in this type of environment.  Get out of your office and co-locate to work with your colleagues.  Share ideas and help each other look at problems differently, brainstorm solutions, or maybe even just practice that big presentation in front of an unbiased [...]

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NEEMO: An Analog for Asteroids

| As you may know, NASA has been working on new concepts for the human exploration of asteroids.  Across the agency, experts are being called into action to develop solutions to this new challenge. In particular, NEEMO-15, slated for October 17th-26th, will test new tools, techniques, timelining approaches and communication technologies which could be useful when [...]

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Voice of the Virtual Participant

| We’ve all experienced the shift. Meetings confined to the meeting room? Not so much anymore. Over the past decade, decision-making boards and widely attended conferences, along with the average team meetings, are rarely restricted to the people in the physical room. Rather, teleconferencing technologies promise to save dwindling travel budgets, connect distributed teams, gather worldwide [...]

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NASA Open Source Summit

| This past week, NASA hosted it’s first Open Source Summit at Ames Research Center. The event was an overwhelming success and it really set the stage for the future of Open Source at NASA. If you didn’t have a chance to attend, the event brought together engineers and policy makers across NASA and respected members [...]

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NASA Open Source Software Development

| Open source software development allows free access to software source code to allow anyone to make improvements and is revolutionizing the way software is created, improved, and used. The open source software movement is inherently transparent, participatory, and collaborative. Open source at NASA gives the public direct and ongoing access to NASA technology. Its adoption [...]

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The Sp.ace

| The Sp.ace is a open collaboratory and workspace at Johnson Space Center focused on creating participatory environment that invites innovation and challenging the normal rules of business. Since opening in February 2011, the Sp.ace has provided coworking space for a variety of projects, including Engineers Without Borders, OpenGov, and the NASA FIRST participants. The Open [...]

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NEEMO-15 and Zooniverse

| This October, NASA will send astronauts and engineers to the National Marine Sanctuary in Key Largo to live underwater for 10 days as part of the NEEMO-15 Mission. NEEMO stands for “NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations”, and is a project that trains NASA explorers for missions to planetary destinations. The crewmembers of this mission will [...]

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