It was discovered on 12 February 1985, by American astronomer couple Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker at Palomar Observatory in California.
[6][7][8] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link (CALL) adopts Petr Pravec's revised WISE-data, that is, an albedo of 0.2091 and a diameter of 6.39 kilometers for an absolute magnitude of 13.29.
[5][a] The observations revealed, that Bascom is a synchronous binary asteroid that has a moon orbiting its primary every 43.5 hours.
[3] This minor planet was named in memory of Florence Bascom (1862–1945), the second woman to earn her Ph.D in geology in the United States.
Bascom founded the geology department at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, where she taught the next generation of notable female geologists for 33 years.