They're involved, and they're building orbital sensors, and they are the OG discovers of really big gamma ray bursts.
Why?
Well the Departamento de Energía de Estados Unidos (DOE) (as the article refers to them) is interested in "energy" .. and by "energy" they really mean nuclear weapons.
It was a Cold War thing.
Their interest here is in ground truthing and the elimination of "normal, not a bomb" stuff ... it'd be a bad day if an astro event billions of years in the past triggered a global thermal nuclear war because Bob the nanosecond reflex triggerhappy automaton got confused about a couple of rapidly spinning galactic core black holes eating each out.
