Allowing us to prospect for mineral deposits on the surface and then place installations like this would definitely keep me spending more time in the SRV a lot more than I am now.
I remember David Braben talking in the initial dev diaries about how prospecting and selling information about good mining sites would be an activity in the game. This is currently not possible with asteroid fields being uniform in their mineral yields (everyone knows how to find a pristine metallic) but if they can pull of semi-persistent deposit POIs where you can drop a rig and leave it to consume the POI over time, that would allow so much more emergent gameplay.