It was discovered on 20 September 1993, by German astronomers Freimut Börngen and Lutz Schmadel at the Karl Schwarzschild Observatory in Tautenburg, Germany.
It is a member of the small group of Zhongguo asteroids, located in the Hecuba gap (2:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter) near 3.27 AU.
Contrary to the nearby unstable Griqua group, the orbits of the Zhongguos are stable over half a billion years.
[2] Based on a generic magnitude-to-diameter conversion, Helmholtz measures 13 kilometer in diameter for an absolute magnitude of 13.2 and an assumed albedo of 0.057, which is typical for carbonaceous asteroids.
[1][6] This minor planet was named after German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), a prolific naturalists of the 19th century.