The Mini-Earth facility and present status of habitation experiment program.

The history of construction of the CEEF (the Mini-Earth), the configuration and scale of the CEEF are initially described. The effective usable areas in plant cultivation and animal holding and habitation modules and the accommodation equipment installed in each module are also explained. Mechanisms of the material circulation systems belonging to each module and subsystems in each material circulation system are introduced. Finally the results of pre-habitation experiments conducted until the year 2004 for clarifying the requirements in order to promote final closed habitation experiments are shown. c2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of COSPAR.