Pallas is one of the largest asteroids, roughly 513 kilometres across, and one of the four main asteroids used in modern astrology, named for Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom and skilled warfare. It was found within a year of Ceres, prompting Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, who had organised a network of astronomers to search systematically for a missing planet between Mars and Jupiter, to recognise that more than one such body existed. Together with Ceres, Pallas was for several decades counted as a planet in its own right in astronomical tables, before the growing number of similar discoveries led astronomers to reclassify these bodies as a distinct class of minor planets, or asteroids.
Like Ceres, Pallas was given an individual pictorial glyph at discovery in keeping with the convention then used for planets, a courtesy not extended to most asteroids found after the 1850s, which meant Pallas retained a recognisable symbol available for later astrological revival. Pallas also carries the most tilted orbit of the four, inclined some 34.8 degrees to the ecliptic, a peculiarity noted by astronomers from soon after its discovery and one that still makes it a comparatively difficult target for spacecraft, unrelated to its glyph history but part of what marked it out among the earliest asteroid finds as distinctly unlike the tidy, nearly circular planetary orbits then known.