designation: 1990 MU) is a large Earth-crossing asteroid (ECA) belonging to the Apollo group of near-Earth objects which also cross the orbits of Mars and Venus.

However, the object was precovered by the Anglo-Australian Near-Earth Asteroid Survey on six photographic plates from the UK Schmidt Telescope dating back to 1974.

This technique has more success with the Amor group of asteroids which do not cross the orbit of the Earth and consequently have long periods of opposition when they can be observed.

[5] 1990 MU has an Earth minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of 0.0263 AU (3,930,000 km), which is close enough to classify it as a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA).

[12] The Gaia mission of the European Space Agency, launched in December 2013,[13] has been tasked with measuring the Yarkovsky effect on near-Earth asteroids (NEAs).