The main-belt asteroid named after the mythological figure is officially designated 55 Pandora. The number 55 records its place in the sequence of numbered minor planets, while Pandora is its proper name.
German astronomer George Rümker discovered Pandora on September 10, 1858, from the private observatory at Hamburg. The asteroid was later named for Pandora from Greek mythology, continuing the nineteenth-century practice of assigning classical names to newly discovered asteroids.
55 Pandora is a stony S-type asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It should not be confused with Pandora, Saturn’s moon, which was discovered more than a century later by Voyager 1. The shared name refers to the same mythological source, not to a physical relationship.