Named in honor of Andrew F. Cheng (b. 1951), planetary scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. Cheng served as the project scientist on the NEAR mission to (433) Eros and has made significant contributions to a wide variety of solar-system topics, including the study of magnetospheres and investigations of minor-planet surfaces and geodesy using LIDAR techniques. Name proposed by the discoverer and B. E. Clark, and citation written by J. Veverka.