Discovery
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a space telescope launched into Earth orbit in December 2009, imaged 2010 TK7 in October 2010 while carrying out a program to scan the entire sky from January 2010 to February 2011. Spotting an asteroid sharing Earth's orbit is normally difficult from the ground, because their potential locations are generally in the daytime sky. After follow-up work at the University of Hawaii and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, its orbit was evaluated on 21 May 2011 and the Trojan character of its motion was published in July 2011.

Physical and orbital characteristics
2010 TK7 has an absolute magnitude of about 20.6. It has an estimated diameter of about 300 meters, based on an assumed albedo of 0.1. No spectral data are yet available to shed light on its composition.
The asteroid has an orbital period of 365.389 days, comparable to Earth's 365.256 days. On its eccentric (e = 0.191) orbit, 2010 TK7's distance from the Sun varies annually from 0.81 AU to 1.19 AU.
Trojan asteroids in actuality do not orbit right at Lagrangian points but oscillate in tadpole-shaped loops around them (as viewed in a co rotating reference frame in which the planet and Lagrangian points are stationary). However, 2010 TK7's loop is so unusually elongated that it sometimes travels nearly to the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth. Its orbit does not bring it any closer to the Earth than 20 million kilometers (12.4 million miles), which is more than 50 times the distance to the moon. 2010 TK7 is presently at the near-Earth end of its tadpole, which facilitated its discovery.
2010 TK7's orbit has a chaotic character, making long-range predictions difficult. Prior to A.D. 500, it may have been oscillating about the L5 Lagrangian point (60 degrees behind Earth), before jumping to L4 via L3. Short-term unstable libration about L3 and transitions to horseshoe orbits are also possible.

Significance
2010 TK7 is the first asteroid discovered to be a member of a category known as Earth Trojans. The orbits of such objects could make it less energetically costly to reach them than the moon, even though they are dozens of times more distant. Such asteroids could one day be useful as sources of elements that are rare near the Earth's surface. On Earth, siderophiles such as iridium are difficult to find, having largely sunk to the core of the planet shortly after its formation. A small asteroid could be a rich source of such elements even if its overall composition is similar to Earth's; because of their small size, such bodies would lose heat much more rapidly than a planet once they had formed, and so would not have melted, a prerequisite for differentiation. Their weak gravitational fields also would have inhibited significant separation of denser and lighter material; a mass the size of 2010 TK7 would exert a surface gravitational force of less than 0.0001 times that of Earth.

Potential for exploration or mineral exploitation
Although an Earth Trojan, 2010 TK7 is not an energetically attractive target for a space mission, because it orbits the Sun in a plane inclined about 21 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. This takes it so far above and below the Earth's orbit that the required delta-v for a spacecraft to match its trajectory coming from Earth's would be 9.4 km/s, while some other near-Earth asteroids require less than 4 km/s.