Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yes. NEAR Shoemaker became the first spacecraft to soft-land on an asteroid when it touched down on 433 Eros on the 12th of February 2001. The landing was unplanned; the descent was intended as a controlled impact, but the spacecraft survived at an estimated speed of 1.5 to 1.8 meters per second.
NEAR Shoemaker studied 433 Eros, an S-type asteroid measuring approximately 13 by 13 by 33 km, making it the second largest near-Earth asteroid. The spacecraft orbited Eros from February 2000 and landed on it in February 2001.
The spacecraft was renamed after planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker following its 1996 launch. It was originally called Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) before the tribute was added.
On the 20th of December 1998, the first of four scheduled rendezvous burns aborted immediately after initiation. The spacecraft entered safe mode, began tumbling, and burned through 29 kg of propellant. Contact with mission control was lost for over 24 hours. The root cause was never definitively determined.
The total mission cost was $224 million: $124.9 million for spacecraft development, $44.6 million for launch support and tracking, and $54.6 million for mission operations and data analysis. NEAR was the first launch of NASA's Discovery Program, which aimed to keep mission costs below $150 million.
The last data signals from NEAR Shoemaker were received at 7:00 p.m. EST on the 28th of February 2001. A final contact attempt on the 10th of December 2002 failed, likely because surface temperatures on Eros reached approximately -173 degrees Celsius, making continued operation impossible.