It seems the developers of Mass Effect 3 have removed the planet probing feature from the second installment and are replacing it with something else entirely. According to Merchant2006 who was spending his time reading an Xbox 360 magazine in WHSmith:
Instead, the whole scanning for minerals has been replaced with another system. Preston Watamaniuk said along the lines of replacing the mineral scanning with a search and rescue system; you can go around and explore these conflict zones – trying to find survivors and that’s pretty much where we will be able to collect minerals and… things. I guess.
Since this is coming from an unofficial source, it is not to be taken as truth just yet. We will be sure to update once we have an official statement regarding the removal of planet mining.
