It was discovered on 18 March 1936, by Finnish astronomer Yrjö Väisälä at the Iso-Heikkilä Observatory in Turku, southwest Finland.
[1] Esperanto has been determined a non-family asteroid from the main belt's background population by means of modern HCM-analysis, after it had previously been grouped to the Eos family by Zappalà in the 1990s.
[12] In March 2012, a rotational lightcurve of Esperanto was obtained from photometric observations by Andrea Ferrero at the Bigmuskie Observatory (B88) in northern Italy.
[11] According to the surveys carried out by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRAS, the Japanese Akari satellite and the NEOWISE mission of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Esperanto measures between 43.3 and 64.3 kilometers in diameter and its surface has an albedo between 0.03 and 0.098.
[5][6][7][8][9][10] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0714 and a diameter of 43.31 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 10.3.