In order to figure out what ores a potential moon for Moon Mining Operations contains, it can be scanned using a Survey Probe Launcher and one of the survey probes, which require the skills "Astrometrics" and "Survey" to be trained to at least level 3.
There are three different kinds of survey probes, which differ in their size, required skills and time required for a scan:
- Quest Survey Probe I - The easiest to use with the lowest skill requirements, takes 20 minutes to complete a scan
- Discovery Survey Probe I - As easy to use as the Quest Survey Probes, but the quicker scanning time of 5 minutes comes at a larger size of the probe.
- Gaze Survey Probe I - Combines the small size of the Quest Probe with a quick scanning time of 2.5 Minutes. However, using Gaze Probes requires considerably more training of the involved skills.
In order to scan a moon, the scanning capsuleer first needs to warp to the moon that is to be surveyed. Once there, the ship needs to be aligned towards the moon before launching the probe, simply flying towards it is enough. Once the probe is launched, it will continue on the ships trajectory and the probe has to hit the moon in order to produce a scan result. It is entirely possible to launch more probes and scan multiple moons at once while waiting for the results of already launched probes.
All current probes in space as well as the scan results obtained within the system are available within the Moon Probe and Analysis window:
Contact to any probes in space will be lost when the scanning capsuleer leaves the system in any capacity, such as by jumping out or docking. Once results have been received from the probes, they will be available within the Moon Analysis window until the next log out.