Elite Dangerous: Thargoid Sensor Fragments to unlock Engineer Professor Palin

Discovered by FlyBoyXD on Reddit.

Ship requirements: Any ship with an SRV (so planetary vehicle hangar and a vehicle occupying it). I guess maybe you could do it on foot? I’m honestly not sure if personal weapons can break the sensor.

Go to the system Solati, and the body is Halla. There’s a crashed ship on the surface, it did not show up as a Point of Interest for me, I had to manually fly to the coordinates. The coordinates are 36.9423, -100.2683 on Odyssey.

If you land near the crashed site, you can use your ship’s lights to light it up if it’s night time:

The red dot on the image above (might be hard to see, click for a full size screenshot) is where the thargoid sensor is. Drive up to it and shoot it to break it. If you don’t shoot it, you can scoop up the entire sensor, which is one unit of cargo, and caustic, so will damage your ship. If you break it, one or two sensor fragments will drop, these are materials, don’t take up any space, and don’t do any damage.

While you’re there, there’s a crate with materials in it that you can shoot to get a random raw material like Zinc (blue dot), and there’s usually a crate of food there (green dot), but at the typical prices it’s not worth the effort to pick up four of them and cart them back to your ship.

Finally if you drive around the top of the crashed ship (right of map) there’s a data port you can scan with your SRV in analysis mode for possible encoded materials.

To get more, exit the game to main menu, and then re-log. This will reset the instance, and you can repeat the above process as many times as necessary. No need to drive back to your ship to relog, I just relogged right in front of the thargoid sensor.

I grabbed 50 of them so I could unlock both engineers, but it’s very close to Palin (27LY) and further from the other one.