It was resolved with an apparent diameter of 0.20 arcseconds (4.5 pixels in the Planetary Camera) and its shape was found to be nearly spherical.

[10] It was discovered by J. R. Hind on 22 August 1852, and named after Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck.

Its historical symbol was a star over Fortune's wheel; it is in the pipeline for Unicode 17.0 as U+1CECC 𜻌 ().

[11][12] Fortuna has been perturbed by the 80 km 135 Hertha and was initially estimated by Baer to have a mass of 1.08×1019 kg.

[3] On 21 December 2012, Fortuna (~200 km) harmlessly passed within 6.5 Gm of asteroid 687 Tinette.