The Proton Contamination Problem of RBSPICE's electron data during March 1, 2013 storm event

The RBSPICE (Radiation Belt Storm Probes Ion Composition Experiment) is one of five instrument suites onboard the twin Van Allan Probes (or Radiation Belt Storm Probes; RBSP), launched August 30, 2012 by NASA. One of science targets of RBSPICE instrument is to determine "how changes in that ring current affect the creation, acceleration, and loss of radiation belt particles?". For that purpose, it measures ions and electrons simultaneously. Ion's energy range is from ~20 keV to ~1 MeV and electron's energy channel is from ~35 keV to 1 MeV in order to provide supplementary information about the radiation belts. In this paper, we investigate a reliability of the electron flux measured from the RBSPICE by comparing with ECT (The Energetic Particle, Composition and Thermal Plasma Suite) data. We found there is a critical proton contamination problem in the electron channels of ~ 1MeV of RBSPICE observations during one moderate storm event of Sym H ~ -76 nT on March 1, 2013.