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Jan 26, 2015
7 min read

(CNN)The firebrand leader of Greece's left-wing Syriza party appeared to be bracing for a bigger battle as he declared victory in Sunday's election.

Now that his party has apparently won the support of his country's voters, Alexis Tsipras has another fight in front of him: making good on his campaign promise to renegotiate the terms of Greece's bailout.

"We are regaining our lost dignity ... Now that we are heard by all of Europe, we will fight with the same passion, the same confidence," Tsipras told cheering supporters. "So let's go and let's all continue this beautiful and tough fight."

With more than 70% of votes counted, Syriza was officially projected to win at least 149 seats in the 300-seat Parliament.

Exit polls also placed the party in the lead. But analysts cautioned that it was still too close to call whether Syriza would win a majority of seats -- a key step that would allow the party to govern without forming a coalition government.

Tsipras, 40, who could become Greece's next prime minister, also vowed to end austerity measures.

"Greece leaves behind the austerity that ruined it, leaves behind the fear, leaves behind five years of humiliation, and Greece moves forward with optimism and hope and dignity," he told the crowd.

Syriza's pledges to try to get some of Greece's colossal debt written off and roll back unpopular austerity measures appealed to exasperated members of the electorate -- even if they potentially jeopardize Greece's place in the eurozone. The election could lead to a dramatic showdown with the debt-laden nation's lenders.

"That is a gamble that people in Greece seem to be prepared to take at this point, simply because the terms of its bailout have been so severe," Greek journalist Elinda Labropoulou told CNN on Sunday.

One of those people willing to take the risk is Eleni Antoniou, a former public sector employee.

"People went bankrupt since we entered the bailout, poverty is visible across society, and I believe that hope is coming with Syriza's program, not only for Greece, but for all of Europe," she said ahead of the election.

Outgoing prime minister: My conscience is clear

The austerity imposed by Greece's international creditors has cut deep. Unemployment has soared to 28%, and many people who still have jobs have seen drastic decreases in wages, pensions frozen and the retirement age pushed back.

Alexis Tsipras, Syriza expected to win Greek vote 03:03

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The governing New Democracy party had pointed to recent improvements in economic indicators as signs things were getting better.

After conceding defeat Sunday, outgoing Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said his conscience was clear.

"I got a country on the verge of ruin. I was asked to try and save it, and I did it," he said. "Most people did not believe we could stand strong, but we did."

Now, he said, Greece is secure and "slowly walking away from the crisis."

"And more than anything," he said, "I give back a country that is a member of the European parliament and the euro."

'Not the future of austerity'

In his victory speech Sunday, Tsipras noted that Greece's election could have an impact far beyond his country's borders.

"Our victory is, at the same time, it's a victory for all the people of Europe that are fighting against austerity that's ruining the common European future," he said.

His message is one that has resonated in other southern European countries under the restrictions of international bailouts.

Syriza's victory could boost other populist parties, like Beppe Grillo's anti-euro Five Star Movement in Italy and the Podemos Movement in Spain.

But it's unclear how its plans to renegotiate the bailout would play out.

Is Alexis Tsipras man of the moment?

CNN's Penny Manis and Isa Soares contributed to this report.

(CNN)NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is closing in on Pluto and its five moons. Soon we will see what no one has ever seen before: Crisp, clear pictures of the tiny, icy world.

"The pictures are what we're all waiting for," Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, told CNN.

Up until now, the best images of Pluto have been a few pixels shot by the Hubble Space Telescope. The images, released in 2010, took four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to produce, according to Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

They show what NASA called an "icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness."

That's not a very glamorous description, but NASA said the images confirmed Pluto is a "dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes, not simply a ball of ice and rock."

New Horizons is aiming its Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) telescope at Pluto to help navigate the final 135 million miles (220 kilometers) of its 3 billion mile journey. Besides LORRI, the space probe is packed with cameras and other instruments. By mid-May, we should get "better than Hubble" photos. We'll also see Pluto's five moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.

Stern expects new "optical navigation images" to arrive any day now.

"I think of Pluto as a kind of a Christmas present that's been sitting under the tree" waiting to be unwrapped, Stern said. "I just can't wait to see what's there."

New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006. It will arrive at Pluto on July 14, 2015. The probe is 27 inches (0.7 meters) tall, 83 inches (2.1 meters) long and 108 inches (2.7 meters) wide. It weighed 1,054 pounds (478 kilograms) at launch.

New Horizons was launched before the big debate started over whether it's a planet. For the scientists on the New Horizons team, Pluto is very much a planet -- just a new kind of planet.

"New Horizons is on a journey to a new class of planets we've never seen, in a place we've never been before," says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver of APL. "For decades, we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it's really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them."

Some interesting tidbits about Pluto:

-- Pluto is classified by NASA as a dwarf planet.

-- It has five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.

-- Pluto is about two-thirds the diameter of Earth's moon.

-- It probably has a rocky core surrounded by ice.

-- It's one of a group of objects that orbit beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt.

-- Pluto is about 20 times as massive than Ceres, the dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter that will be explored by the Dawn spacecraft on March 6, 2015.

-- Pluto has a 248-year-long elliptical orbit around the sun.

-- From 1979 to 1999, Pluto was actually closer to the sun than Neptune.

-- Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatoryin Flagstaff, Arizona.

-- It was named by 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England.