Last year the Oregon State University Robotics Club had a stellar debut at the Mars Society's University Rover Challenge. The team's 2008 Mars rover won first place, earning glory and national recognition.

This year's competition is still a month away, but OSU took its first step toward defending the title Saturday at Adair County Park, as the club showed off its 2009 creation. The team will take the rover to the Utah desert at the end of May to test it against rovers built by other institutions, including schools from Canada and Poland.

Saturday's public demonstration had some hitches - which was part of the plan.

"The reason for this is so we can see everything fail and see what we did incorrectly before we go out and let other teams see what we did incorrectly," said Ryan Albright, the club's vice president and the project team leader.

Working feverishly the night before to meet their self-

imposed deadline, team members discovered some of the rover's belts were sliding. Rather than risk stripping the belts, which they couldn't easily replace, the club decided to forgo driving the rover on the ground Saturday. Instead, they did a stationary demonstration.

At the competition, the team will have to guide the rover through four tasks. In one, the rover will have to find a "distressed astronaut" near a specific GPS coordinate and deliver a package. Last year, OSU's team was the only one to find the astronaut.

Another task requires the team to attach hex bolts to a structure - via the Rover's robotic arm.

A third test is to find a type of bacteria, using optical equipment. A high-definition, long-range camera and a digital compass will help accomplish that task.

All of the "missions" will take place in the Utah desert, which junior Ben Goska said "looks surprisingly a lot like Mars."

The 2008 win raised the club's profile. From about 25 members last year, the roster swelled to 110 this year. About 20 are working on the Rover project.

The bigger membership also meant the club had a wider variety of expertise to draw on. Last year's members were all electrical engineering majors; now they have mechanical engineering and computer science majors.

"The design is much better than last year, and we're definitely going to do much better than last year," Albright said.

A good showing is important not just for bragging rights but to help recruit future engineering students and secure OSU's status as a high-caliber institution for engineering.

"It's pretty impressive," said OSU employee Olga Matytsina, who watched the demo. "It's too bad I can't go to Utah and go to the competition."