Can the Gaia telescope detect small temporarily captured asteroids near its Lagrange orbit? The Gaia space telescope is in a Lissajous orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. The orbit period is about 180 days and the size of the orbit is 263,000 x 707,000 x 370,000 km. It has been theoretically concluded that there should be a population of temporarily captured orbiters (TCO's) around that Lagrange point. All but a handful of them should be less than a meter in diameter and too small to be observed from Earth. Only one TCO, 2006 RH120, has ever been observed, a 5 meter diameter one.

Since Gaia will be in a somewhat similar orbit as the TCO's and will scan the entire sky several times over the coming years, and an IR telescope is sensitive to asteroids, I wonder if it will be able to detect such TCO's. And if so, what could we find out about them? Gaia will not track any asteroids nearby, if it catches the same TCO more than once it would be by chance, I suppose. Could Gaia learn about their sizes, orbits, surface compositions?
Yes.

Detection of inner Solar System Trojan Asteroids by Gaia (pdf):


  The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. While mapping the whole sky, the Gaia space mission is expected to discover thousands of Solar System Objects. The se will include Near-Earth Asteroids and objects at Solar elongations as low as 45 degrees, which are difficult to observe with ground-based telescopes. We present the results of simulations for the detection of Trojan asteroids in the orbits of Earth and Mars by Gaia.