It was discovered on 5 April 1981, by American astronomer Edward Bowell at the Anderson Mesa Station in Arizona.
[1] Levasseur is a member of the Mars-crossing asteroids, a dynamically unstable group between the main belt and the near-Earth populations, crossing the orbit of Mars at 1.66 AU.
[1] This minor planet was named after Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd (born 1945), a French planetary scientist and former astronaut candidate.
She has been professor at UPMC in Paris and works at the French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS.
[9] Levasseur is a common, stony S-type asteroid,[3][7] in line with the Phocaea family's overall spectral type.