Case later decided that the long-term effect of his injuries precluded him playing baseball at the college level, and turned to scientific study. This led to his research focus on
particle measurement in space. the subject of his first published paper, in 2008, and subsequent research. After BU, Case began a
postdoctoral fellowship at the
Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in
Cambridge under
Justin Kasper. He continued to analyze CRaTER data and began preliminary work on the solar cup for what was then known as the Solar Probe Plus, scheduled to launch in 2018. Case worked on the team that designed SWEAP (Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons), the instrumentation that collected and measured the particles in the coronal plasma. For them the challenge was even greater. In order to function properly, one of the two parts of SWEAP, the Faraday cup known as the Solar Probe Cup (SPC), had to remain directly exposed to the Sun, outside the heat shield's protection. "We have this unique problem with the SPC of trying to allow in the particles we want to measure," Case told
Physics, "while also dealing with all the light and heat that comes with them." The team tested materials for the SPC using four modified
IMAX movie projectors shining on them in a
vacuum chamber to simulate the intense sunlight it would have to deal with.
Aluminum, usually preferred in spacecraft instrumentation, was found to easily melt and grow brittle in that heat. They finally found only three metals—
niobium,
tungsten and
molybdenum—that could take the heat. "That's pretty much it for the main constituents of metals that we could use", Case said." Ultimately they chose TZM, an
alloy of 99 percent the latter element, combined with
titanium and
zirconium to strengthen the otherwise brittle molybdenum, for the SPC. The specialized mesh filter that helps trap particles in the cup was made of tungsten. To insulate the niobium wiring which supplied that mesh to 8,000 volts, the team obtained single-crystal
sapphire pieces, again the most heat-resistant material they could find, and grew them in the lab. "One of the considerations when we choose materials to make a cup out of is that we want them to be as inert as possible", he explained. "We want materials that don't interact when we place them together in a hot thermal environment". To deal with the risk of data corruption from heliomagnetic events such as flares and CMEs, the SPC makes three separate copies of its data. In the event of a disparity between the copies, the software defaults to the data in the majority as the uncorrupted version. "If there's a solar flare," Case said, "we can deal with that penetrating radiation, and it doesn't cause any significant effects within the spacecraft."
HelioSwarm Case left CfA for
BWX Technologies at the beginning of 2023, where he is a research scientist focusing on instrumentation and is the instrumentation and control (I&C) lead for the nuclear reactor subsystem of the nuclear thermal propulsion engine on the DRACO program. His doctoral advisor, Harlan Spence, is the lead investigator for the planned
HelioSwarm probe, scheduled for launch in 2028. It will consist of a group of nine satellites, organized as a hub with eight nodes, that will go into a lunar-
resonant Earth orbit, to better measure plasma
turbulence from an unprecedented variety of perspectives at once. Understanding that phenomenon better will be very helpful to future space missions, crewed or not, and in protecting satellite communications better against solar events. ==Legacy of shooting==