Exploiting the richness of dynamical behavior for system state estimation *

Understanding of Hall Effect Thruster (HET) physics has moved in lockstep with the application of experimental diagnostics to interrogate the plasma.  Historically, the electric propulsion (EP) community has focused strongly on velocity-space and spatially-resolved plasma diagnostics to study HET behavior and perform model calibration.  This presentation will focus on the recent efforts in the EP community to explore the development of suitable dynamical representations of plasma signals to provide inexpensive, accessible, high quality validation metrics suitable for system state estimation and model calibration.  In addition, it will briefly explore intriguing new applications of nonlinear dynamical systems theory enabled by ready access to high speed signals from modern data acquisition systems.