It was discovered on 21 December 1997, by Japanese amateur astronomer Naoto Sato at his Chichibu Observatory near Tokyo, central Japan.
The family, named after 44 Nysa, is located near the 3:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter, a depleted zone that separates the inner from the intermediate asteroid belt.
[1] Based on the Moving Object Catalog (MOC) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Gongju has a spectral type of a stony S-type asteroid.
[8] In October 2012, a rotational lightcurve of Gongju was obtained from photometric observations by American astronomer John Ruthroff at the Shadowbox Observatory in Indiana.
Lightcurve analysis gave a well-defined rotation period of 4.829 hours with a high brightness amplitude of 0.80 magnitude, indicative of a non-spherical shape (U=3).