Asteroid 55 Pandora shares its name with the mythological Pandora.
The object is a main-belt asteroid discovered by George Mary Searle at the Albany Observatory in New York on 10 September 1858. It received the name Pandora after the figure from Greek mythology, continuing the long astronomical practice of assigning mythological names to minor planets.
55 Pandora is not the same object as Pandora, one of Saturn's moons. The asteroid orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt, while Saturn's Pandora orbits a planet and belongs to a completely different class of solar-system body.
Its number, 55, records its position in the sequence of asteroid discoveries, not its size or age. The asteroid is relatively small and has an irregular shape. The nearby mythological names Psyche, Vesta, and Juno belong to other numbered asteroids, so they are plausible but incorrect alternatives for this specific designation.