It orbits the Sun in the inner main-belt at a distance of 1.8–2.5 AU once every 3 years and 2 months (1,168 days).
[8] In January 2013, a rotational lightcurve of Waterman was obtained from photometric observation taken at the U.S Etscorn Observatory in New Mexico.
It gave a well-defined rotation period of 7.581 hours with a brightness variation of 0.51 magnitude (U=3).
[3] This minor planet was named in honor of American physicist Alan Tower Waterman (1892–1967), who was the first director of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
He went to Washington to serve with OSRD (1941–45), ONR (1946–51), and NSF (1951–63), after being an academic physicist for 25 years.