Short answers, pulled from the story.
Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first known asteroid on the 1st of January 1801 while searching for a star in the constellation Taurus. He initially mistook the moving object for a comet but later confirmed it had no tail.
Carbonaceous types make up roughly seventy-five percent of all known asteroids and contain dark volatile-rich materials. These objects differ from silicaceous types which account for seventeen percent and consist mainly of stony rock.
The majority of known asteroids orbit between Mars and Jupiter at distances ranging from two to four astronomical units from the Sun. Their paths follow slightly elliptical orbits that take three to six years to complete a full circuit around the star.
NASA launched the NEAR Shoemaker probe to study asteroid 433 Eros starting in 1997 and became the first spacecraft to successfully land on an asteroid surface in 2001. Japan's JAXA agency subsequently sent Hayabusa to collect samples from 25143 Itokawa which returned to Earth on the 13th of June 2010.
In September 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft deliberately crashed into Dimorphos to shorten its orbital period by approximately thirty-two minutes. This collision proved that kinetic impact could successfully alter an object's trajectory away from Earth.