Such objects had previously been observed in the orbits of Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, and the Saturnian moons Tethys and Dione.

The asteroid was discovered in October 2010 by the NEOWISE team of astronomers using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

[7] WISE, 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.

[8] 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.

[4] During the 5 December 2012 Earth close approach of 0.197 AU (29,500,000 km; 18,300,000 mi),[11] the asteroid had an apparent magnitude of about 21.