[hinkley]

You know how the martian landers now use a crane to lower the lander to the ground so the retro rockets are outside of the ground effects range?

Someone proposed doing something similar with a lander, where a landing-site-prep robot gets dropped first. But that sounded like a lot of hovering to me, and a solution that would be very specific to lunar landing. I can't see that being successful on anything with higher gravity.

Better perhaps to send a separate stage or a scouting mission to do the work, then land later.