NASA has confirmed the true origins of the mysterious "jelly doughnut" rock and the results are unsurprisingly ordinary.

According to the Associated Press, NASA announced Friday they had solved how the rock seemed to have appeared in front of the Opportunity Mars rover out of nowhere. The rover broke the rock after driving over it then nudged the piece into the field of view.

"Once we moved Opportunity a short distance, after inspecting Pinnacle Island, we could see directly uphill an overturned rock that has the same unusual appearance," Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis, said in a news release. "We drove over it. We can see the track. That's where Pinnacle Island came from."

Named Pinnacle Island, the jelly doughnut rock was found to have high levels of manganese and sulfur, which suggested they were concentrated in the rock by the action of water.

"This may have happened just beneath the surface relatively recently," Arvidson said, "or it may have happened deeper below ground longer ago and then, by serendipity, erosion stripped away material above it and made it accessible to our wheels."

NASA previously released a side-by-side image of the area where the rock had been to where it mysteriously appeared. The space agency was even hit with a lawsuit for not investigating the rock. The scientists who filed the suit theorized the rock rapidly grew and accused NASA of covering up Pinnacle Island.

Opportunity just celebrated its 10th year on Mars, but its twin rover Spirit was decommissioned in 2010. Curiosity is going on a year and a half on Mars and NASA has announced it plans to launch another rover of the same size in 2020.

Opportunity can now continue on another assignment NASA gave to examine some exposed rock layers on a slope.

"Our team working on Opportunity's continuing mission of exploration and discovery realizes how indebted we are to the work of people who made the early missions to Mars possible, and in particular to the heroics of Bill McClure and Jack Beverlin," said rover team member James Rice, of the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz., said in the release. "We felt this was really a fitting tribute to these brave men, especially with the 45th anniversary of their actions coming today."