Chevyrev-Galbraith and Goren-Love show that the successive minima of the Gross lattice of a supersingular elliptic curve can be used to characterize the endomorphism ring of that curve. In this paper, we show that the third successive minimum $D_3$ of the Gross lattice gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the curve to be defined over the field $\mathbb{F}_p$ or over the field $\mathbb{F}_{p^2}$. In the case where the curve $E$ is defined over $\mathbb{F}_p$, the value of $D_3$ can even yield finer information about the endomorphism ring of $E$.

24 pages, code available at https://github.com/gkorpal/minimal-gross