Palladium Palladium Palladium is a chemical element with symbol Pd and atomic number 46. It is a rare and lustrous silvery-white metal discovered in 1803 by William Hyde Wollaston. He named it after the asteroid Pallas, which was itself named after the epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, acquired by her when she slew Pallas. Palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium form a group of elements referred to as the platinum group metals (PGMs). These have similar chemical properties, but palladium has the lowest melting point and is the least dense of them. More than half the supply of palladium
2 Pallas Mars. The "Dawn" team was granted viewing time on the Hubble Space Telescope in September 2007 for a once-in-twenty-year opportunity to view Pallas at closest approach, to obtain comparative data for Ceres and Vesta. 2 Pallas is named after Pallas Athena (Ancient Greek: ), an alternate name for the goddess Athena. In some mythologies Athena killed Pallas, then adopted her friend's name out of mourning. "Pallas" is a Greek name and some other languages use variant versions of it for the asteroid: in Italian, "Pallade", Russian "Pallada", Spanish "Palas", and Arabic "Bālās", for example. In Chinese, however, the asteroid has