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The NBC News article Mile-wide asteroid and its tiny moon to zoom past Earth this weekend; Dubbed 1999 KW4, the "binary" space rock will skim past our planet harmlessly at a distance of 3 million miles. shows the animated GIF below, and links to the Asteroid Tracker page 1999 KW4.

Images there are credited to

Dr. Steven Ostro et al. - http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/~ostro/kw4/

but that link is dead. They also link to Wikimedia for sources

Without the link to Ostro et al (which Wikimedia also links to) there's no way to track this down.

How did scientists go from radar images to this very detailed GIF of two bodies orbiting each other, with such detail of the huge equatorial ridge on alpha?

enter image description here

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Probably another victim of NASA's consolidating and messing up its web sites. $\endgroup$
    – Organic Marble
    May 23, 2019 at 23:01
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    $\begingroup$ I just climbed the tree from that broken link and ended up here: echo.jpl.nasa.gov There's a link from that page to echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/1999KW4/1999kw4.html which appears to be what you are looking for. This is very far out of my wheelhouse so I won't be writing anything up on this. $\endgroup$
    – Organic Marble
    May 23, 2019 at 23:51
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    $\begingroup$ @OrganicMarble Jackpot! That's beautiful stuff, thank you sir. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 23, 2019 at 23:55
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    $\begingroup$ I considered directly asking Dr. Ostro, but unfortunately he has passed on: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_J._Ostro $\endgroup$
    – GrapefruitIsAwesome
    Jan 9, 2022 at 17:50
  • $\begingroup$ @OrganicMarble I wonder if you would considered expanding or at least stretching your wheelhouse? Still no answers. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Jan 9, 2022 at 17:52

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