The moon is set to take a direct hit from a Chinese lunar mission rocket next month, but it is “well built to take that sort of abuse”, according to the astronomer who initially misidentified the rocket as belonging to American company SpaceX.

The rocket, which is as heavy as an Asian elephant, is set to strike the surface of the far side of the moon on March 4. It was a booster for the Chang’e 5-T1 mission and launched in 2014 as part of the Chinese space agency’s lunar exploration programme.

“This is a roughly four-tonne object that will hit at 2.58km [1.6 miles] per second,” said astronomer Bill Gray, who was the first to identify the future impact. “The moon is fairly routinely hit with larger objects moving in the ballpark of 10-20km per second – hence the craters.”

Writing on his personal website, he said the rocket would hit the moon in the 520km-wide Hertzsprung crater, which cannot be seen from Earth.

The astronomer said he misidentified the object in 2015 as a booster rocket built by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company.

“The object had about the brightness we would expect, and showed up at the expected time and moving in a reasonable orbit,” he said, adding that “in hindsight, I should have noticed some odd things” about it.

Quentin Parker, head of the University of Hong Kong’s space research laboratory, said there was nothing to worry about for people on Earth, although small amounts of debris could fall into the Earth’s orbit.

“The impact could eject significant amounts of material into space,” he said. “Small amounts of debris could eventually fall into the Earth’s orbit … but most will fall back closer to the impact site.”

He added that there had been instances of space debris landing on Earth, including pieces of Mars rock that were found by researchers.

“The moon is being bombarded by space rocks all the time – it gets hit by about 2,800kg [6,175lbs] of meteoritic material each day, but mostly of very small size,” he said.

Parker said it was extremely unlikely that the rocket would hit near the Chinese rover Yutu 2, working on the far side of the moon, where it recently investigated a “mystery hut” that turned out to be a rabbit-shaped rock.

Nonetheless, the rocket’s initial misidentification showed the difficulty of tracking even large pieces of space junk, Parker said.

“I believe all spacefaring nations need to use space responsibly for all mankind, and this includes being responsible for the problems space debris is creating,” he said, warning of “a cascade of growing collisions between satellites until low-Earth orbit becomes unusable”.

Jonti Horner, professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland, said the rocket’s crash would cause “the birth of a new crater on the moon – a hole created by that violent impact” of about 20 metres (65 feet) in diameter.

He said the collision would offer an exciting opportunity to study how impact craters were formed.

“New craters are being formed on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system all the time, but we don’t normally get advance notice,” he said.

“[This time], we know exactly what the object is that will be involved in the collision, how big it is, what it is made of and how fast it is coming in – so it’s almost like a controlled experiment where we can see what happens when something like this hits the moon.”

• READ: Rocket set to hit Moon on March 4 was built by China, not SpaceX, say astronomers

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