I've put an ancient survey module on a probe and send it outside of my ship-range to the other side of the system. When I press the (auto) "survey" button (bottom left on the screen) I expect it to go to the nearest artifact/capsule/junk. Instead it goes to the nearest artifact/capsule/junk inside my ship-range, despite being a probe and far outside my ship-range.
I can make it manually do surveys outside the ship-range, just not automatically.