Asteroid 55, discovered in 1858 and named after the Greek myth, is called Pandora.
55 Pandora is a main-belt asteroid discovered by George Mary Searle on September 10, 1858, at the Albany Observatory in New York. Its name refers to Pandora of Greek mythology, linking a nineteenth-century astronomical discovery with one of antiquity’s best-known stories.
The asteroid is not the same object as Pandora’s satellite in the Saturn system. Astronomers later used the mythological name Pandora for Saturn XVII, a small moon discovered in 1980. The shared name can cause confusion when readers encounter “Pandora” in astronomy.
Asteroid 55 Pandora belongs to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is an example of the long tradition of naming minor planets after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. The number 55 records its position in the historical sequence of asteroid discoveries, not its size or distance from Earth.