72 Feronia is a quite large and dark main belt asteroid. It was the first asteroid discovery by C. H. F. Peters, on 29 May 1861, from Hamilton College, New York State. It was initially thought that Peters had merely seen the previously discovered asteroid 66 Maja, but T.H. Safford showed that it was a new body. Safford named it after Feronia, a Roman fertility goddess.
This asteroid is orbiting the Sun with a period of 3.41 years, having a semi-major axis of 2.266 AU and an eccentricity of 0.121. The orbital plane is inclined by an angle of 5.4° to the plane of the ecliptic. This is a spectral type TDG asteroid with a cross-section size of 84 km. The asteroid has an estimated rotation period of 8.09 h. Hanuš et al. (2013) gives two possible solutions for the pole in ecliptic coordinates: (λ1, β1) = (287°, −39°) or (λ1, β1) = (102°, −55°).