It was discovered on 9 April 1861, by American astronomer Horace Tuttle at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

[13][14][15][17][18] Analysis of the best-rated lightcurve by French amateur astronomers Maurice Audejean and Jérôme Caron from February 2011 gave a rotation period of 9.73509 hours with a brightness amplitude of 0.25 magnitude (U=3).

[4][15] In 2016, a modeled lightcurve was derived from various photometric database sources, giving a concurring sidereal period of 9.73570 hours and two spin axes of (49.0°, −70.0°) and (225.0°, −68.0°) in ecliptic coordinates.

[6][7][8][9][10][11] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0618 and a diameter of 71.82 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 9.36.

In 1861, the director of the discovering observatory, George Phillips Bond, raised a minor concern since these names had already been applied to some of the brightest stars of the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus: Maia, Electra, Asterope and Merope.