3281 Maupertuis
asteroid
3281 Maupertuis (prov. designation: 1938 DZ) is a bright Vesta asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt. It was discovered on 24 February 1938, by Finnish astronomer Yrjö Väisälä at the Turku Observatory in southwest Finland. The likely elongated V-type asteroid has a rotation period of 6.7 hours and measures approximately 5.5 kilometers (3.4 miles) in diameter. It was named after French geodesist and mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis.
Orbit and classification
Maupertuis is a member of the Vesta family (401), a giant asteroid family of typically bright V-type asteroids. Vestian asteroids have a composition akin to cumulate eucrites (HED meteorites) and are thought to have originated deep within 4 Vesta's crust, possibly from the Rheasilvia crater, a large impact crater on its southern hemisphere near the South pole, formed as a result of a sub-catastrophic collision. Vesta is the main belt's second-largest and second-most-massive body after Ceres. Based on osculating Keplerian orbital elements, the asteroid has also been classified as a member of the Flora family (402), a giant asteroid family and the largest family of stony asteroids in the main-belt.
It orbits the Sun in the inner asteroid belt at a distance of 2.1–2.6 AU once every 3 years and 7 months (1,316 days; semi-major axis of 2.35 AU).
The public source identifies “3281 Maupertuis” as asteroid. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Maupertuis and asteroid.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q151213. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1938.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “3281 Maupertuis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.