Use Unity to create a simulation involving relative motion for the Sun, Earth, and Mars. After creating orbits for Earth and Mars, one can place a camera on Earth pointing toward Mars. Then, against the background sky, Mars will show a retrograde motion around the opposition of Mars.
To create the simulation, you can start with circular orbits, and later, we can adjust this to accurate elliptical orbits.
You can see the example in https://stemin3d.net/tech/tutorials (“Procedural Sun-Earth-Moon Model Creation”) to create a similar one for Sun-Earth-Mars.
When you create a Unity script, create a tutorial as shown in the above example, “Procedural Sun-Earth-Moon Model Creation”, so that future students can reproduce what you have created. The goal of this simulation is to create a Unity model demonstrating the retrograde motion of Mars by using accurately created Earth and Mars orbits around the Sun.
Important pending tasks (or notes/ideas) to complete the simulation.
These are technical prerequisites (3D model components) to create this simulation.
These are newly created components (functions, materials, cameras, etc.) from this topic simulation.
These are underlying astronomical concepts to teach with this simulated topic.
These are key scenes of the simulation; based on storyboard files.