2001 – NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touches down in the "saddle" region of 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. 433 Eros is a stony asteroid of the Amor group, and the first discovered, and second-largest near-Earth object. It has an elongated shape and a volume-equivalent diameter of approximately 10.4 miles. Visited by the
NEAR Shoemaker space probe in 1998, it became the first asteroid ever studied from its own orbit.
Shoemaker (NEAR Shoemaker), renamed after its 1996 launch in honor of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, was a robotic space probe designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros from close orbit over a period of a year. It was the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid and land on it successfully. In February 2000, the mission closed in on the asteroid and orbited it. On February 12, 2001,
Shoemaker touched down on the asteroid and was terminated just over two weeks later. The primary scientific objective of
NEAR was to return data on the bulk properties, composition, mineralogy, morphology, internal mass distribution, and magnetic field of Eros.