Anthony W. Case
Anthony W. Case (born 1980) is an American astrophysicist who has designed instruments to study the solar wind and cosmic rays on unmanned spacecraft.
After college, Case worked at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for 13 years, where he has helped develop Faraday cups for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Parker Solar Probe (PSP), and the planned HelioSwarm, earning several awards from NASA.
As he was doing so, a freshman, Kip Kinkel, having killed both his parents at their home the previous night, entered and began shooting at the 300 students present[5] with the two pistols and semi-automatic rifles he was carrying in the trenchcoat he was wearing.
He was rushed to Sacred Heart Medical Center in nearby Eugene, where doctors found that in addition to the blood loss he had suffered, the bullet in his leg had become dislodged, causing further nerve and artery damage.
Only then could they turn to Case's right leg, where the bullet had pierced an artery and vein in the knee and the thigh above it, leaving the portion below without blood flow for a long time.
At the sentencing hearing on those counts two months later, Case, by then studying at Lane Community College, was among the last of the victims and family members to make a statement.
[1] Case later decided that the long-term effect of his injuries precluded him playing baseball at the college level, and turned to scientific study.
[16] In 2012, he became one of CfA's staff astrophysicists, working on Faraday cups, a device used to capture particles in a vacuum, for space probes.
[18] 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.
"[18] It used the same basic design as previous Faraday cups on interplanetary space probes such as Voyager and DSCOVR, but the materials would have to be different given how close the PSP would be going to the Sun.
[19] 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.
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.
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.
The PSP is making 24 orbits through 2025, going closer to the Sun each time, eventually becoming the first probe to penetrate the Alfvén surface, the outer boundary of the corona.
[19] Data from the mission has helped point to one long-theorized explanations for the hotter temperature of the corona: Alfvén waves and the magnetic switchbacks they create.
[22] 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.
[23] Case has kept the bullets that were removed from his body and stores them with his high school baseball trophies and other mementoes of that time in his life.
His right ankle has never regained full mobility,[1] leading Case to limp occasionally,[24] but other than that he has no impairments from the shooting and engages in recreational activities like hiking, bicycling and running.
"I’m hoping there will be meaningful change in that maybe we get rid of some different types of assault weapons, large-capacity magazines, and enforce better background checks", he said on the 20th anniversary of the shootings.
[24] Kinkel, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after the shooting, applied for clemency in 2021 when Oregon's then-governor Kate Brown announced she would consider those requests from adults incarcerated for crimes committed as juveniles.
While at the time he had felt Kinkel's motive was irrelevant—"can't we just call him a bad person and a criminal and a murderer, and not worry about whether it was a mental illness?—he now appreciated the role it played: "It's hard to look back and place the full blame on him," he told The New Yorker in 2023.
