The minor planet named Pandora after the Greek myth is 55 Pandora. It was discovered in 1858 by George Mary Searle at the Albany Observatory in New York.
55 Pandora is an asteroid in the main asteroid belt, the broad region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Its name follows a long astronomical tradition of assigning mythological names to newly identified minor planets. The number 55 indicates its position in the sequence of numbered asteroid discoveries.
The object is not the source of Saturn’s F ring shepherd moon Pandora, although the two bodies share the mythological name. Saturn’s Pandora is a small moon discovered much later and belongs to a completely different planetary system.
The asteroid’s mythological name connects it with Pandora’s story, but astronomy does not treat the object as a literal representation of the jar or its contents. It is simply a named celestial body whose designation preserves a classical reference.