It was discovered during the Palomar–Leiden survey on 24 September 1960, by astronomers Ingrid and Cornelis van Houten at Leiden, on photographic plates taken by Tom Gehrels at Palomar Observatory in California.

[4][5] As it is located in the dynamical region of the Vesta family,[16] the asteroid is potentially a Vestian interloper due to its completely different spectral type.

[17] This minor planet was named after Estonian-German optician and astronomer Bernhard Schmidt (1879–1935), who invented the Schmidt camera, a telescope design with a spherical primary mirror and an aspherical correcting lens, providing a wide field of view with little optical aberrations.

[2] Proposed by Paul Herget, the asteroid's official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 15 August 1970 (M.P.C.

[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0603 and a diameter of 17.28 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 12.48.