[1] This minor planet was named after Dersu Uzala, a Siberian trapper and hunter and friend of Russian writer Vladimir Arsenyev, who named the main character of his novel Dersu Uzala after him.
The approved naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 6 February 1993 (M.P.C.
[10] In December 2006, a rotational lightcurve of Dersu-Uzala was obtained from photometric observations by American photometrist Brian Warner at the Palmer Divide Observatory in Colorado.
Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period of 140±3 hours with a brightness amplitude of 0.60 magnitude (U=2).
[12][13] According to the surveys carried out by the Japanese Akari satellite and NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, Dersu-Uzala measures 6.01 and 6.34 kilometers in diameter and its surface has an albedo of 0.164 and 0.30, respectively.