- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
One of the old-school Bungie lore guys posted a pretty convincing theory back in 2004 that you may find interesting (It has been almost 2 years so give me the benefit of the doubt if my details are off):
Basically the top ranks of the UNSC brass had known about the Halo rings and the existence of the Flood, long before the conception of the SPARTAN program. The guy quoted some very elaborate communications that he had found within the book, but for the life of me I cannot remember them.
However they pointed to a certain General/Admiral acknowledging that there was some kind of experimentation going on with the flood virus/disease on one of the Halo rings. Hopefully someone from 2004 will remember the story and can help me out here!
So with this in mind I would assume that Halsey would have probably known about the experiments on the Halo ring, and therefore would recognize forerunner artifacts when she saw them. Thus she may have taken the artifact simply for its forerunner apperance (whithout necessarily knowing what it actually did), and figured it was important.
My own theory is that (in the event that Bungie finally does shed some light on the Halsey-Kelly story with their game), that the artifact will have something to do with completing the overall Arc activation sequence. I am also guessing that it may have some kind of tracking signal in it, which is why Truth jumped his fleet to earth by accident -- because he was following the forerunner signal in the artifact.
But just some food for thought.