I believe this is already planed. I have read it somewhere else. I don't remember if was from an official source.

This is something BIS want to do. Not sure there is a definite plan for it, and certainly no timeframe yet.

I got confirmation that this is a plannet feature from one of the devs.

landing the rover is a preprogrammed event, in real life it would be to difficult to land the probe by hand. Would love some landing errors tho. Now it lands almost with pin point accuracy.

In real life it would be impossible to land the probe by hand due to the communication delay times! :-) It could be done if it were controlled form a manned orbiter, though.

Now that would be cool - the ability to fund and launch a manned orbiter, and then have the "Mission Control" screen change to display the inside of the orbiter's command center!

i agree with Dahunn ...
Actually comunication with mars take 2 min up to 30 min (depending of how far mars is from hearth at this time) so controling by hand a landing prob is just not fesable (but this is the same for rover, in reality you would not be able to directly control the rover unless you have precognition or are in orbit but no human being have been that far away from hearth yet) in reality when the prob/rover start hes descent this is like "press the button and cross finger hope for it to succeed".

In my opinion the landing phase of the game is great as it is and should not be redone. as a side note i would say that having the control of it also make you more potent to screw it all as computer are less likely to fail than humans in regular and predictable circumstances.

I would rather like to see a "take control" button, letting the IA do hes job and take over it if there is a problem. (letting people that want to land themselves take control at the begining of the landing and alowing others to play it with realisme as it is now)

finally if the problem is linked to radial or hover trusters, the skycrane lifting cables or the module inflatables, taking direct control of it wouldn't help at all.

And what some version for advanced players and let them program the landing procedure by themselves ? :) There is plenty space for calculation errors. But surely it has to be optional.

I think there should be a possibility to steer that lander for game fun over realism.

I had three large landers in a row that failed to hit the designated target point. They missed the correct exploration point by 70 to 90 meters. As a result the mission did not start, so no taking of photos, no probes etc.
This nearly killed my space program, invested and lost around 7.000k without any invest - quite a hard failure on investigating the first crate.

Maybe one could be moving a lander similar to a rover? Moving one "leg" at a time. It would be very slow of course and maybe not that precise as with a rover, but at least one would not loose the money to further run ones Space Program.

Implemented in newest updates :)