CASSINI RADAR RINGS OBSERVATIONS: CALIBRATION AND AMBIGUITY HANDLING

This paper describes a set of Cassini radar data collected on Saturn’s rings in the last year of operations when the space- craft was flown very close to the ring system. After describing the observing geometry, real aperture and range-compressed backscatter results are presented which reveal many of the in- teresting features of the ring system. The range-compressed backscatter has the potential for higher resolution results from these data, but first, the calibration has to account for the presence of range ambiguities. An algorithm for ambiguity removal based on solving a singular value decomposition is explored along with its inherent limitations.