These are the non-official, non-government sponsored jobs. ... Unless it's not the Scout Service giving them the job...
This may not fit your conception but IMTU the Scout Service has two roles one on the frontier and one in the interior. The frontier version is exactly what you'd expect however the interior version is based on the idea that the Imperium simply doesn't care about the minor planets inside the Imperium as long as they don't cause problems. They only care about the alpha planets. So the Scout Service's job in the interior is to provide the cheapest possible way of keeping tabs on the minor planets with the detached duty option as an even cheaper extension of that idea.
So the public role of detached duty scouts might be to keep astrographic data up to date or whatever it is but their actual role from the Imperium's point of view (although the Scouts themselves don't necessarily know it) is to provide people on the minor planets with individuals who can be hired to solve local problems without hassling the navy.
IMTU some of these jobs might be from the local govt. of a minor planet so official in one sense but still hired on a private contract basis rather than through the Imperium govt. so no recall. That part may not fit your conception of "odd jobs" but either way one niche for detached duty scouts would be freelance law enforcement a bit like the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the wild west so activities around crime: bounty hunters, missing persons, item retrieval, surveillance etc.
On the distance point re things like bounty hunting, missing persons etc, one option would be to assume that if it comes up on the roll the target is close or it's a false rumor that is close. Another option is rather than being given a target some unknown distance away a database of cases is uploaded to the ship at scout bases so when they're on a planet for some other reason they might get a match from local data so for example a trip to a resort planet for a vacation turns into a bounty hunter or missing person job once there.
Also criminality itself could be an option as detached duty scouts would be well suited to that also. The players could reject it but if they don't that's a whole new career path.
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"the sensor package for a Scout Ship. Considering that a Scout Ship is supposed to be able to accurately survey a planetary system and do reasonably thorough surveys of selected planets, intuitively is would seem that a Scout Ship would have a fair amount of space, say several dTons, devoted to a sophisticated sensor array. However, the standard Scout Ship design does not seen to allow for this. Any one else have thoughts about this?"
Personally I've always imagined the slightly bigger survey ships doing the detailed planetary level surveys with the class A scouts in the expendable "first in" big picture type role, surveying the system level objects, navigation hazards, ancient alien distress signals etc.
