It was discovered on 8 October 1977, by German astronomer Hans-Emil Schuster at ESO's La Silla Observatory in northern Chile.
[5] Carlwirtz is a member of the Mars-crossing asteroids, a dynamically unstable group between the main belt and the near-Earth populations, crossing the orbit of Mars at 1.66 AU.
[1][6] It also belongs to the dynamical Hungaria group, which forms the innermost dense concentration of asteroids in the Solar System.
[3] It is, however, not a member of the Hungaria family (003), but a non-family asteroid of the main belt's background population when applying the hierarchical clustering method to its proper orbital elements.
In June 2013, a rotational lightcurve of Carlwirtz was obtained from photometric observations by American photometrist Brian Warner at the Palmer Divide Station (U82) in California.