[3] It is, however, a non-family asteroid from the main belt's background population when applying the Hierarchical Clustering Method to its proper orbital elements.

[3] A large number of rotational lightcurves of Tama were obtained from photometric observations since it has been identified as a binary asteroid (see below).

[7][8][9][10][11] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link derives an albedo of 0.2048 and a diameter of 12.82 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 11.8.

The satellite was identified based on lightcurve observations with mutual occultation and eclipsing events from 24 December 2003 to 5 January 2004 by Raoul Behrend, René Roy, Claudine Rinner, Pierre Antonini, Petr Pravec, Alan Harris, Stefano Sposetti, Russell Durkee, and Alain Klotz.

[16] Another modeled lightcurve using data from UAPC, the Palomar Transient Factory survey, and individual observers, gave a period of 16.4461 hours as well as two spin axes of (193.0°, 32.0°) and (9.0°, 28.0°) in ecliptic coordinates (λ, β).