I think the "scanning of things that aren't planetary bodies" has a good chance of being worked into UA behavior. In the same way that scanning a nav beacon might reveal system data and points of interest, it's not a big stretch of the imagination that scanning a UA could reveal a POI, barnacle locations, or even a hidden planet half a lightyear away!
Scanning nav beacons probably won't be possible in unpopulated space with regards to barnacles but they would be a much more immersive way of maybe finding distress calls from crashed ships in systems rather than checking the wanted ads in Galnet.