You don't even need that. So long as you know the body exists - whether that's because you honked the system on a previous visit, or a wingmate honked it now - you can get a basic surface scan done without any sort of exploration scanner equipped at all.
HIP 10716 shows up unexplored?
- Thread starter Elprez
- Start date
It happened to me again today, after I have been destroyed (when I was on the ground SHIP and SRV), after I returned in orbit, all the planet names was empty, and the far planets have disappeared from my computer (I had to scan the system again - with advanced discovery scanner and with surface scanner too)...
Bingo.
You need to go and sell that data (to a station +20ly away) to lock in the data.
If you die before then, you lose the data, thus need to scan it all again.