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?