Since it was not possible to send the probe to Venus, it would instead merely investigate interplanetary space and an actual mission to the planet would have to wait another three years.

There were some minor anomalies with the second stage flight control system that resulted in unplanned pitch and roll motions, however, they were not enough to endanger the mission.

The major portion of the data was received by the Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory and the Hawaii Tracking Station because their antennas provided grid reception.

[2] In common with Explorer 6, Pioneer 5 used the earliest known digital telemetry system used on spacecraft, codenamed "Telebit",[14] which was a tenfold (or 10 dB) [14] improvement in channel efficiency on previous generation "Microlock" analog systems in use since Explorer 1 and the biggest single improvement in signal encoding on western spacecraft.

Unlike later interplanetary spacecraft (Mariner 2 and beyond), this spacecraft did not use the Deep Space Network, which was not yet available, but a somewhat ad hoc Space Network called SPAN consisting of the 76m Lovell Telescope (then called Manchester Mark I), a 26-meter radio telescope in Hawaii, and a small helical array in Singapore.