It was discovered on 3 May 1981, by American astronomer Edward Bowell at Lowell's Anderson Mesa Station near Flagstaff, Arizona, in the United States.
[1] Hal 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 August 2008, a rotational lightcurve of Hal was obtained from photometric observations by Slovak astronomers Adrián Galád, Jozef Világi, Leonard Kornoš and Štefan Gajdoš at Modra Observatory.
An alternative measurement by French amateur astronomers Pierre Antonini and René Roy gave a much shorter period of 22.68 hours.
[4] This minor planet was named after the fictional and homicidal supercomputer HAL 9000, featured in both Arthur C. Clarke's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).