It was discovered on 15 October 1941, by Finnish astronomer Liisi Oterma at Turku Observatory in Southwest Finland, and named after Henrik Walbeck.
[2][12] The asteroid orbits the Sun in the central main-belt at a distance of 2.0–3.6 AU once every 4 years and 8 months (1,694 days).
[1] In November 2006, a rotational lightcurve of Walbeck was obtained from photometric observations by French amateur astronomer Pierre Antonini.
[4][5][7][8] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link derives an albedo of 0.046 and a diameter of 19.60 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 12.5.
[3] The minor planet was named in memory of Finnish scientist Henrik Johan Walbeck (1793–1822), astronomer and geodesist at the old Academia Aboensis who used the method of least squares to derive a good value for the Earth's flattening.