Prior to the occultation, had only been observed by Pan-STARRS over an observation arc of 3 years. The calculated orbit from these Pan-STARRS observations had significant uncertainty, which would have been unreliable for predicting occultations. In an effort to reduce the orbital uncertainty, the RECON project collaborated with the Pan-STARRS project to do a precovery search of archival Pan-STARRS images to gather extensive astrometric positions of . Follow-up observations by Pan-STARRS were also conducted through 2016–2018 and helped extend 's observation arc to 6.3 years. Although an observation arc of this length is generally unreliable for predicting occultations especially by distant objects, this was compensated by Pan-STARRS's highly accurate astrometric system, allowing for 's orbital uncertainty to be significantly reduced.
