ASTRONEER

You will need to purchase the "Probe Scanner" for 4000 bytes. You can craft said scanner with 1x Steel off your backpack.

After building the scanner place it on one of your aux slots (the backpack "shoulders") and press the corresponding aux button LB/RB to activate the scanner. Once the scanner is on it will start spinning and playing some sort of music like a broken fax machine. When the scanner is spinning it will occasionally slowdown and ping in a direction (it can ping multiple times per revolution), these indicate the direction of a Vintage Probe.

On your way to the Probes the Scanner will occasionally chime at you and the little dots on it will begin to light up, blink, then stay on the closer you get lighting up more of the dots. I didn't realize this until the last few planets as I was chatting with someone during the travels.

After traveling to the Probe you can place the Scanner onto its slot and it will consume the Scanner and give you the Achievement along with a cosmetic. You will only need to complete one Probe per planet. There are at least 4 or 5 pings in any given area.

Fair bit of warning, these Scanners are consumed per Probe so make sure you bring a few at least for each trip.

******Slight spoiler warning******
After completing the last one there will be a hologram of another Astroneer gesturing, this lasts about 30 to 40 seconds and the achievement will unlock after this is done.
******End of slight spoilers******

EDIT: You will need to interact with the hologram that appears out of the last probe, if you miss this you will need to build another Scanner and place it on any Probe (thanks to II Loadsman for the advice!)



Here is a picture of one of the Probes on Novus, note that all of the ones that I found on every planet looked different and varied in size (yours will look similar to this, but with a holographic Scanner coming out of a tier-1 spot somewhere on the chassis, I had already gotten this one so there is no hologram)




Here is the Probe on Calidor (for me), as you can see I had to bury into the mountain and make a cave to find the Scanner Node and place the Scanner onto

I just want to clarify something just in case there is any confusion while you're out looking for your probes. There is only ONE Probe per planet.

I know a lot of you hate links but bare with me.
https://astroneer.gamepedia.com/Historical_Probes

This is a link that shows what each probe looks like and the sort of biome they spawn in. The only RNG you have to worry about is the layout of all of your generated planets. The probe will always be the same, and the biome it's in will always be the same. you just have to use your scanner to find out where. Please refer to Vittror's solution for any more info.

when I did all probes I didn't get the achievement I was so upset and frustrated. Then I looked at the completion percentage and it was at 56% even though I definitely did all the probes. Eventually I realized I was supposed to get a palette every time I did a probe, but I didn't so I went back and did all the probes I didn't get the palette for. When I got to the last one the wanderer showed up and I got the achievement.

Note: when I did all the probes the first time I got the in game notification that I completed the mission to activate all the probes.
So I guess having all the palettes might be what indicates you got the probes.