I got a 'survey duna' contract right after I returned from the first orbital mission, is this a known KSP bug?

[smjjames]

While my first suspicion would have been a mod, the agency was a stock agency, but on my other career save, I didn't see any Duna stuff until I had accidentially sent a bit of debris out of Kerbin SoI, but even then, it was just the 'explore duna' and 'explore ike' ones, I didn't get any survey stuff until after I had been to Duna.

Basically, I'm wondering if this happens commonly or is known.

[Geschosskopf]

Yup, you MIGHT get an "explore" contract before going there.  If you have DMagic Orbital Science, you MIGHT also get some sort of space-based survey contract using DMOS parts prior to going there.  But by and large, you don't start getting other contracts for a given planet or moon until you've already been there.

[smjjames]

Explore contracts I would expect, but not before I had gone solar orbit or had already done Mun and Minmus. Anyway, I checked out the contracts settings via CC and it turns out they're DMOS contracts.

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, smjjames said:

Explore contracts I would expect, but not before I had gone solar orbit or had already done Mun and Minmus. Anyway, I checked out the contracts settings via CC and it turns out they're DMOS contracts.

The "explore" contracts are totally luck of the draw.  Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't.  And they pay no attention to the order in which transfer windows appear.  So, if you wait to go somewhere until you have an "explore" contract, you might be waiting forever.  Either that or waste a bunch of time doing odd jobs you don't really care about to amass the money needed to go there at your own expense.  Thus, one of the things DMOS does is try to give you at least an orbital survey contract as a justification to go somewhere even if you don't have (or never get) the "explore" contract.  It's a nice feature.