Which spacecraft first landed on an asteroid?

The spacecraft that first landed on an asteroid was NEAR Shoemaker.

NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission was built to study the near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros. After launching in 1996, it flew past asteroid 253 Mathilde and entered orbit around Eros in February 2000, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.

On February 12, 2001, mission controllers guided NEAR Shoemaker down to Eros’s surface. The landing was not originally the mission’s primary objective, but the spacecraft survived its low-speed touchdown and continued transmitting data. Its gamma-ray spectrometer became especially useful close to the ground, where it could analyze Eros’s composition more effectively.

A common mix-up is Hayabusa, which later touched down on asteroid Itokawa and returned samples to Earth. Dawn visited Vesta and Ceres but never landed, while Rosetta orbited the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and deployed the Philae lander. NEAR Shoemaker’s achievement was specifically the first successful landing on an asteroid.