Brucia is the first asteroid to be…
December 1891 CE
The asteroid is a member of the Phocaea family, a large family of stony S-type asteroids with nearly two thousand known members.
A former Mars-crosser from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately thirty-three kilometers (twenty-one miles) in diameter, its minor planet designation is 323 Brucia.
Brucia is also the first of over two hundred asteroids that will be discovered by Max Wolf, a pioneer in this method of finding astronomical objects.
Discovered on December 22, 1891, it is named in honor of Catherine Wolfe Bruce, a noted patroness of the science of astronomy, who had donated ten thousand dollars for the construction of the telescope used by Wolf at the Heidelberg Observatory.