About 200 years ago, new year's eve 1800 to be exact, astronomers began discovering large chunks of rock in our solar system orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Some were as large as 600 miles in diameter, others the size of a two car garage. What made them different from comets that streak by Earth on their way to the Sun and back home to outer space, is that asteroids are solid rock usually traveling around the Sun in a fairly circular orbit very far away, although a few exceptions stray from that field and come close to terra firma. But one approach is enough, like the one that did the dinosaurs in 65 million years ago, or the one in 1908 flattening hundreds of square miles of Siberian forests near Tonguska. Comets, on the other hand, are mixtures of rock and ice making an elliptical orbit close to the Sun showing a vapor trail.
Any comet has the possibility of impacting Earth, while very few asteroids ever can.
Discoverers of asteroids usually have the honor of choosing their names. At first names were chosen by astronomers from among female mythological deities, but when they ran out of deities, names were chosen to honor colleagues, friends and family, historical personalities, athletes, artisans, plants, animals, cities, nations, lakes and rivers, as well as ideas and philosophies. Asteroid names are chosen and approved by a special board of the International Astronomical Union gathering periodically at the Minor Plant Center, a division of Harvard University's Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics. Asteroid names cannot be bought, unless you want to endow an observatory, wait a few decades, and keep your fingers crossed. In contrast, a commercial operation does purport to market star names, but these have no use among astronomers who continue to identify stars by their ancient classical names or alphanumerically.