Physics-Informed Multi-Task Surrogate Model for the Martian Nightside Thermosphere

Abstract

Modeling the Martian nightside thermosphere remains challenging due to sparse in situ sampling and strong coupling among transport, magnetic, and seasonal processes. Purely data-driven models can produce non-physical artifacts, such as density inversions, in poorly sampled altitude regimes. We present a multi-task physics-informed neural network that simultaneously predicts the base-10 logarithmic densities of four neutral species (O, CO$_2$, N$_2$, and Ar) using more than a decade of MAVEN/NGIMS observations (MY 32-38, 2014-2025). A shared backbone learns a common representation of the nightside thermospheric state and branches into species-specific output heads. A weak monotonicity prior is incorporated via automatic differentiation by penalizing positive vertical gradients in logarithmic density. Experiments using an orbit-disjoint train/validation/test split show that physics-informed regularization substantially reduces non-physical inversions while preserving predictive skill and slightly improving it in the best-performing configuration, as measured by RMSE, MAE, and $R^2$. The resulting model provides a computationally efficient surrogate for nightside thermospheric reconstruction with improved vertical consistency.