It is likely that it is a rubble pile re-accreted from fragments of Neptune's original satellites, which were smashed up by perturbations from Triton soon after that moon's capture into a very eccentric initial orbit.

As it orbits Neptune, the more inclined Naiad successively passes Thalassa twice from above and then twice from below, in a cycle that repeats every ~21.5 Earth days.

[15][8] Since the Voyager 2 flyby, the Neptune system has been extensively studied from ground-based observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope as well.

In 2002–03 the Keck telescope observed the system using adaptive optics and detected easily the largest four inner satellites.

On 8 October 2013 the SETI Institute announced that Naiad had been located in archived Hubble imagery from 2004.