Asteroid 55 Pandora was named Pandora after its discovery in 1858.
English astronomer George Mary Searle discovered 55 Pandora on September 10, 1858, at the Albany Observatory in New York. It became the fifty-fifth numbered minor planet and was given the mythological name Pandora.
The asteroid is a member of the main asteroid belt, the broad region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is classified as an S-type asteroid, a category generally associated with a stony composition. Its name is unrelated to Saturn’s moon Pandora, although both bodies draw their names from Greek mythology.
Numbering records the order in which minor planets were recognized and confirmed, not a ranking of size or importance. Thus “55 Pandora” identifies this particular asteroid, while the moon Pandora has no asteroid-style number in ordinary usage.