Pallas was discovered on 28 March 1802 by Heinrich Olbers, the second asteroid found and the third largest body in the belt. Its orbit is steeply inclined, about thirty-five degrees to the ecliptic, which is unusually high and means the object spends much of its time well away from the zodiacal band; it has never been visited by a spacecraft, though Hubble imaging shows a heavily cratered and somewhat irregular body. The name is one of the epithets of Athena, Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, craft and strategic warfare who was said to have sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus. In modern astrological use, developed from the 1970s alongside the other asteroid goddesses, Pallas is read for pattern recognition, strategy, craft, creative intelligence and the sort of wisdom that solves rather than contemplates. The dating is the same as for Ceres: this is a symbolism of the last half-century.
Pallas also shares in a piece of history that is usually told only about Pluto. For roughly half a century after their discovery, Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta were counted as planets and printed as such in textbooks and almanacs, making eleven in the solar system. The count held until the 1840s and 1850s, when Astraea and then a rapid succession of further bodies made it clear that these were members of a populous belt rather than planets of the old kind, and the whole group was reclassified. The parallel with the 2006 decision on Pluto is exact, including the reasoning, which makes Pallas an early case of a definitional demotion rather than a discovery being undone.