The presumed carbonaceous C-type asteroid has a short rotation period of 2.9 hours.
[3] In 2007, a rotational lightcurve of Gingerich was obtained from photometric observations by American astronomers at the Calvin-Rehoboth Robotic Observatory (G98) in New Mexico.
Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period of 2.9392 hours with a brightness amplitude of 0.39 magnitude (U=3).
From this, the astronomers suspect the presence of a minor-planet moon, as the depth and length of the decrease in brightness was typical for an eclipsing event seen among many other synchronous binary asteroids.
[3] This minor planet was named after Owen Gingerich (born 1930), professor of astronomy at Harvard University and an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.