170 Maria is a Main belt asteroid that was discovered by French astronomer Henri Joseph Perrotin on January 10, 1877. Its orbit was computed by Antonio Abetti, and the asteroid was named after his sister, Maria. This is the namesake of the Maria asteroid family; one of the first asteroid families to be identified by Japanese astronomer Kiyotsugu Hirayama in 1918. This family may be the parent body of the large near-Earth objects 433 Eros and 1036 Ganymed.
This object is orbiting the Sun at a distance of with a low eccentricity of 0.063 and an orbital period of 4.08 years. The orbital plane is inclined at an angle of 14.4ð to the plane of the ecliptic. The diameter of this body has been measured as .
In the Tholen classification system, this is categorized as a stony S-type asteroid based on its spectrum. Observations performed at the Palmer Divide Observatory in Colorado Springs, Colorado during 2007 produced a light curve with a period of 13.120 hours and a brightness range of 0.21 in magnitude. Previous measurements from 2000 gave 13.14 and 5.510 hour estimates for the period.
An occultation of a star by Maria was observed from Manitoba, Canada, on June 10, 1997.