It was discovered on 28 September 1935, by Dutch astronomer Hendrik van Gent at Leiden Southern Station, annex to the Johannesburg Observatory in South Africa.
[2] van Albada is a member of the Flora family, one of the largest collisional populations of stony asteroids.
[11] van Albada was considered as a flyby target of the NEAR unmanned robotic spacecraft mission in the 1990s.
[10] Between 2012 and 2015, several rotational lightcurves of van Albada were obtained from photometric observations by astronomers Pierre Antonini, Junda Liu, Raoul Behrend and Jean Strajnic, as well as by astronomers at the Palomar Transient Factory in California.
Lightcurve analysis gave a short rotation period between 2.72 and 2.73 hours with a brightness variation between 0.13 and 0.20 magnitude (U=2+/2+/2+/2/2).