Collective Thomson scattering for studying plasma instabilities in electric thrusters

Collective (or coherent) Thomson scattering has recently emerged as an important tool for identifying and characterizing certain instabilities in Hall thrusters. Plasma instabilities in electric thrusters are implicated in diverse phenomena, including reduced efficiency, lifetime and anomalous particle transport. This work discusses the main features of the collective scattering diagnostic PRAXIS, and recent applications of the diagnostic to study the nature of microturbulence at different thruster operating regimes. Early measurements show the presence of a small-scale azimuthal instability may be linked with regimes of unstable thruster operation.