The celestial object discovered in 1858 and named after the mythological Pandora is 55 Pandora. It is a main-belt asteroid discovered by George Mary Searle on September 10, 1858, at the Albany Observatory in New York.
The number 55 is Pandora’s permanent minor-planet designation in the sequence of numbered asteroids. Its name connects nineteenth-century astronomy with classical mythology, a common naming tradition for asteroids. Pandora orbits the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The object is classified as an S-type asteroid, meaning its surface is broadly stony in composition. It is not the same object as Saturn’s moon Pandora, which was discovered much later in 1980 from Voyager 1 images and also received the mythological name.
That second Pandora is a small shepherd moon associated with Saturn’s narrow F ring. The shared name can cause confusion, but “55 Pandora” specifically identifies the asteroid discovered in 1858 by Searle.