Asteroid 433 Eros

433 Eros was discovered on Aug. 13, 1898, by Gustav Witt, director of the Urania Observatory in Berlin, and independently on the same day by Auguste H.P. Charlois at Nice, France. Eros is famous as the first asteroid to be orbited by a spacecraft, and the first asteroid to have a spacecraft land on it. But Eros was important to astronomers as far back as 1898 when it became the first near-Earth asteroid (NEA) to be discovered.