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Not mentioned in the article but significant is that this find represents a very easy asteroid to visit and return to Earth, either a manned mission or an unman

• chime 15y ago
  > Due to the gravitational influence of other planets and the significant contribution of chaos to an asteroid’s orbit, it is impossible to accurately predict 2010 TK7’s behavior over more than a 250 year span, so it may not continue the cycle described above. The erratic behavior might not make this as easy as it sounds. See: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/27/wise-finds-the-very-first-earth-trojan-asteroid/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/27/wi... > ...As soon as I heard about this, I wondered if it would make a good target for exploration; since it’s not moving much relative to Earth, it wouldn’t take much fuel to get there. Unfortunately, the Lissajous orbit of the asteroid takes it well above and below the Earth’s orbital plane (as shown in green in this not-to-scale diagram; click to odysseyenate), making a rendezvous difficult.