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Phoenix follows the history of a Jewish family from the early 19th century to the beginning of the 3rd Millennium, from rural Hungary to Budapest and beyond. Previous generations of our family dreamed of moving to the Unites States to ensure freedom and opportunity for future generations. They tried and failed. They endured near decimation in the Holocaust. And then the family rose from the ashes like a Phoenix, survived life behind The Iron Curtain, and two generations after the first attempt, was finally able to settle in the United States.
Phoenix also describes the author's scientific career from his early years in Hungary to his most formative years at the Space Research Institute in Moscow where he worked with the best space physicists of the Soviet Union. As a young scientist he also played a role as an intermediary between the leadership of the Soviet planetary research program and the West, a role that led to some memorable events. He played leading roles in the international VEGA mission to comet Halley and in the Cassini mission to the Saturn system.
Tamas Gombosi is an accomplished space scientist, author of two textbooks and numerous scientific publications. This is his first non-science book.
A native of Hungary, Tamas Gombosi was educated in theoretical physics at the L疣d Ev University in Budapest. He did his postdoctoral research at the Space Research Institute (IKI) in Moscow, Russia, under the direction of space pioneer Konstantin Gringauz. Early in his career Tamas Gombosi was a member of the scientific staff of the Central Research Institute for Physics (KFKI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1985 he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan.
His scientific contributions span from planetary exploration to theoretical space plasma physics, to kinetic theory and generalized transport equations, to global simulations of space plasmas. His recent interests focus on the development of high performance numerical codes and software frameworks for simulating space plasmas.
Gombosi participated in a number of exciting space missions, including the Venera 9 and 10 Venus orbiters, the VEGA mission to comet Halley, the Dynamics Explorer mission to explore the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, and the Pioneer Venus mission. Recent space missions include the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon Titan, the Rosetta mission to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the STEREO mission to explore solar storms, and the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission.
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