Mally was discovered on 19 March 1931, by German astronomer Max Wolf at Heidelberg Observatory in southwest Germany.
In 1986, Mally was rediscovered by astronomers Lutz Schmadel, Richard Martin West and Hans-Emil Schuster, who remeasured the original discovery plates and computed alternative search ephemerides.
[11][12][13] Mally orbits the Sun in the central main-belt at a distance of 2.2–3.1 AU once every 4 years and 3 months (1,548 days).
[3] In September 2013, a rotational lightcurve of Mally was obtained from photometric observations taken at the Palomar Transient Factory in California.
The fragmentary lightcurve gave a longer than average rotation period of 46.6 hours with a brightness variation of 0.08 magnitude.