Asteroid 55 Pandora was named after Pandora, the woman of Greek mythology associated with the opened jar. German-American astronomer George Mary Searle discovered the asteroid on September 10, 1858, at the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York.
Pandora is a main-belt asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Its designation combines its catalog number, 55, with its mythological name. The object is not the same as Saturn’s moon Pandora, which was discovered much later in Voyager 1 images and has a separate astronomical designation.
The asteroid’s naming reflects a nineteenth-century tradition of assigning classical mythological names to minor planets. It should also not be confused with 55P/Tempel–Tuttle, a periodic comet associated with the Leonid meteor shower. In astronomy, the number is essential because “Pandora” alone can refer to several unrelated celestial objects.