It was discovered on 12 March 1940, by Hungarian astronomer György Kulin at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest.
[11] It is a non-family asteroid of the main belt's background population when applying the hierarchical clustering method to its proper orbital elements.
[4] In January 2011, a fragmentary rotational lightcurve of Cabot was obtained from photometric observations in the R-band by astronomers at the Palomar Transient Factory in California.
Lightcurve analysis gave a poorly defined rotation period of 2.237 hours with a brightness amplitude of 0.10 magnitude (U=1).
[4] This minor planet was named after Italian explorer John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto; c. 1450–1499), who discovered the coast of North America in 1497, the first recorded landfall since the Norse voyages.