MARSIS MARSIS MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) is a low frequency, pulse-limited radar sounder and altimeter developed by the University of Rome La Sapienza and Alenia Spazio (today Thales Alenia Space Italy). The Italian MARSIS instrument is operational on the European Space Agency, "Mars Express" orbiter mission. The MARSIS Principal Investigator is Giovanni Picardi from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy. It features ground-penetrating radar capabilities, which uses synthetic aperture techniques and a secondary receiving antenna to isolate subsurface reflections. MARSIS identified buried basins on Mars. MARSIS was funded by ASI (Italy) and NASA (USA). On
Peggy Rae Sapienza an Officer of BWAWA, she was a key factor in the formation of DC17, a bid to bring the Worldcon back to Washington DC in 2017, which was launched in October 2013. DC17 lost the site selection vote held at Sasquan in August 2015. She married her second husband John Sapienza, a long-time RPG aficionado who had contributed to TSR's AD&D and Chaoseum's RuneQuest (2nd ed), in 1999. Their honeymoon was in Australia, where not unexpectedly, Sapienza was recruited on short notice to run Volunteers at AussieCon III. More recently she was on the Bid Committee and represented Nippon, first