It was discovered on 21 September 1987, by American astronomer Edward Bowell at the Anderson Mesa Station of the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, in the United States.
[1][6] Kohman is a non-family asteroid from the main belt's background population, and a member of the small group of Griqua asteroids,[3] located in the Hecuba gap and locked in a 2:1 mean-motion resonance with the gas giant Jupiter.
[4] Contrary to the nearby Zhongguo asteroids, the orbits of the Griquas are less stable with a much shorter lifetime.
[5] This minor planet was named after Truman Paul Kohman (1916–2010), American professor of nuclear chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University who co-discovered in 1954 the nuclide aluminium-26, which has since been studied in meteorites and given important information about the early history of the Solar System.
[1][6] In 1947 he coined the word nuclide to describe an atom with given numbers of protons and neutrons in its nucleus.