The asteroid was discovered on 14 October 1980, by a team of astronomers at the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China.
[2] Magnanimity orbits the Sun in the inner main-belt at a distance of 1.9–2.9 AU once every 3 years and 8 months (1,350 days).
[3] A rotational lightcurve of Magnanimity was obtained from photometric observations by Czech astronomer Petr Pravec at Ondřejov Observatory in September 2013.
It gave a well-defined and longer-than-average rotation period of 20.719 hours with a brightness variation of 0.25 magnitude (U=3).
As a commemorative gesture, the IAU's Committee for the Nomenclature of Small Bodies chose three objects discovered from observatories on different continents and christened them with names representing some of the most basic and universal human values.