Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski leaves court in September 2019. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Anthony Levandowski, the man at the center of Google's epic legal battle with Uber over trade secrets, has agreed to plead guilty to stealing a single confidential document from Google. The guilty plea is likely to lead to a prison sentence of between two and two-and-a-half years.

Levandowski, a gifted engineer, was one of the early stars of Google's self-driving car project. In 2015, he decided to leave Google to start his own self-driving car startup. According to the plea deal, on his way out the door, Levandowski downloaded thousands of confidential Google documents and transferred them to his personal laptop. Uber acquired the startup a few months later in a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Google conducted a forensic investigation and discovered what Levandowski had done. Google then sued Uber for theft of trade secrets. The companies settled the lawsuit a year later, with Uber giving Google more than $200 million in Uber stock.

Enlarge / Tiny wires may boost heat flow. (credit: Rice University)

Getting rid of heat is one of the central challenges with modern technology. It doesn’t matter whether the technology is a high-end server CPU or some pathetically anemic processor in a no-brand set-top box—someone has had to think about thermal management. One of the central issues in thermal management is thermal resistance, a material's tendency to limit the flow of heat. The thicker a material, the larger the temperature gradient required to achieve the same amount of cooling because the thermal resistance increases with thickness.

Except when it doesn’t. If the heat is carried by ballistic phonons, thermal resistance stays constant.

Energy in motion

Heat is basically energy. In a solid material, energy is stored in two places: the motion of electrons, and the motion of the nuclei. The motion of electrons can pull nuclei into motion, while likewise, nuclei kick electrons around, so energy travels back and forth between the two.

Enlarge / The Rocket Report is published weekly. (credit: Arianespace)

Welcome to Edition 2.36 of the Rocket Report! We've returned after a week off, into the midst of a global pandemic, with the longest report ever. So enough of this preamble, and let's jump right into the news.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Momentus and SpaceX team up for rideshare. When Momentus purchased rides on five SpaceX Falcon 9 smallsat rideshare missions in 2020 and 2021, it wanted to showcase the ability of its Vigoride in-space transportation vehicle to move customer satellites 300 to 1,200 kilometers beyond the drop-off point, SpaceNews reports. "By ferrying payloads to multiple orbits from a single launch, we multiply the capability of an already impressive system that has revolutionized access to space," Momentus CEO Mikhail Kokorich said.