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One of Sukarma's tool arms flexed and extruded the plasma lance module. Errant gusts of mist from escaping internal gas pockets squirted from the seal as another arm sucked a toolhead inward. Sukarma grabbed the exiting toolhead with the freed tentacle grip and a faint translucent plating appeared in mid-air to extract the toolhead temporarily. Ceramic toolhead exterior moved to her surface where the translucent plating held it to dorsal stern. This process repeated a second time to the dorsal port side. Lance toolheads out of the way Sukarma exuded modules upward from internal storage. A large compact dish array came out from the distended end of one to unfurl as a large 20m sensor dish spread. The other side emerged slightly from the tool port revealing the large toolhead anchor of a multispectral telescope. The tentacle on which it resided inflated slightly as Sukarma assembled the tool on the inside.

Her cheerful voice came over the comms though her broadcast video did little but change avatar to different shades of yellow, "Okay! I'll take readings before I mine anything so I don't shatter any obvious structures. You can pull the data off my workspace link if you want!"

Large dish held in place positional thrusters along her dorsal and ventral side added a small polar rotation while she took in frames of radiospectral data

Her eyes opened to a gold lid and looked at the 'camera' askance turning purple on blue, "Plasma lance shockwave mining is quicker but do you want any raw crystal samples? Because that'll kinda, like, pulverize everything. I don't have the crew to do careful impact fracking but I can get out and use hand tools If I have to."

As radio frequency data indicated the presence of asteroids and she softly rotated data mounted. She wasn't a geologist but the automated tools gave her some idea about them. NASA did get her a special multidisciplinary overview degree so she could understand the basics of what her crew wanted. She didn't sleep well for nearly two years after the art degree she got first. The life was brutal.

As the ship rotated and freed its arc the telescope pointed at the largest rocks found among them. She took basic spectral views of the asteroids to get some information about what was in her targets and the system. The interior of the workspace was accumulating vast quantities of raw data though refined packages became available as tools worked in her executive space. She had a great deal of internal memory. The statistical packages she was given largely ran unattended in non-executive as long as she didn't try looking at the process.