I suspect most people do exploration like I do, sending cheap unarmed survey ships out to explore new jump point branches and accepting a few of them getting blown up by hostiles as the cost of doing business. This is efficient and low effort, but I've always felt it was a bit lacking in dramatic narrative (and from an RP perspective, very ruthless).
That made me think, though, what if there were benefits to putting more effort into exploration? An obvious inspiration would be the various Star Treks. The Enterprise and similar ships are always conducting science between the space crystal and Klingon encounters, not just finding the jump points (well, admittedly Trek doesn't have these) and mineral deposits. I think this might be a nice feature for Aurora. Maybe that jump point has a spatial anomaly that gives your scientists insights into shields, or the minerals on a planet feature a rare alloy that would be useful in your construction factories.
So my suggestion is a Science Lab module. Something relatively big and expensive, maybe 50 or 100 HS. If a ship with a science lab surveys jump points or planets, it has a chance of generating research points for a random tech you have available to research, like salvaging ships does. I see no reason it couldn't use the same mechanic; so when it returns to a system with a research lab it automatically downloads the data.
This both makes for larger, more expensive survey ships (If you choose to utilize them; I do think it should be an option), and means that if some space monster eats your survey ship you lose any research it was carrying. So I think a side effect of this change would be to encourage either pre-sweeping systems or escorting your science ships with a small task force, which could lead to some tactically interesting battles as well.