Short answers, pulled from the story.
433 Eros was discovered on the 13th of August 1898 by Carl Gustav Witt at the Berlin Urania Observatory and Auguste Charlois at the Nice Observatory, independently on the same night. Witt was actually photographing beta Aquarii to study another asteroid when Eros appeared on his plate.
433 Eros was the first minor planet ever given a male name, breaking a convention of using female names for all minor planets. The exception was made because Eros was the first near-Earth asteroid ever discovered, placing it in a new category that warranted a new naming tradition.
NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft landed on 433 Eros on the 12th of February 2001, using its maneuvering jets to touch down softly. It was the first spacecraft ever to land on an asteroid, and it had spent about a year orbiting and photographing Eros before the landing.
Dynamical modeling suggests 433 Eros has roughly a 50 percent chance of evolving into an Earth-crossing orbit over a long timescale, and it could make that transition within as little as two million years. If it struck Earth, it would be about five times larger than the object that formed the Chicxulub crater and caused the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
433 Eros is a stony asteroid with a density of 2.67 grams per cubic centimeter, similar to Earth's crust. Daytime temperatures at perihelion reach around 100 degrees Celsius, while nighttime temperatures fall to near negative 150 degrees Celsius.
Data gathered by the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft in December 1998 suggested that 433 Eros could contain around 20 billion tonnes of aluminum, along with similar amounts of metals that are rare on Earth, such as gold and platinum. The mission also found 334 dust ponds on the surface and evidence that a single impact about 1 billion years ago reshaped roughly 40 percent of the asteroid.