Short description about Orion tech-Radiation, heat shield, parachutes etc.

http://www.dispatchtribunal.com/nasa-reveals-5-orion-technologies-that-willhelp-astronauts-get-home-from-mars/6115/

Different pdf related to Radiation

https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/Shielding/
Magnetic for radiation Shielding
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spacehazards/radiation/superconducting-magnets-protect-spacecrafts-spaceradiation/
Plastic Could Protect Astronauts from Deep-Space Radiation
http://www.space.com/21561-space-exploration-radiation-protectionplastic.html

There are several different things labeled "radiation". Gamma rays are electromagnetic
radiation, similar to visible light but at a higher frequency. X- rays are also
electromagnetic radiation. For electromagnetic radiation, elements with heavy nuclei are
good shielding. See this Wikipedia article on protection against electromagnetic
radiation.
Also called radiation are high speed protons and atomic nuclei.
And the high speed nuclei can vary a lot in velocity. High speed nuclei from outside the
solar system are called Cosmic Rays. These tend to be a lot faster than the high speed
ions coming from the solar wind or the Van Allen Belts.
Galactic Cosmic Rays often are moving at close to light speed. When a such a high
speed nuclei or proton strikes a massive nuclei (such as a lead nucleus), it is like a cue
ball breaking a rack on a pool table. You have particles going every which way
forming secondary cosmic rays. To avoid this shower of secondary particles, atoms with
small nuclei are desirable. So hydrogen rich compounds may be better shielding against
GCRs. Water is often suggested as shield against GCRs.

Radiation can be several things, but since you specifically mentioned lead shielding,
let's look at X-rays - a lot of what you learn applies to other radiation as well.
To stop radiation it needs to interact with "something" that makes it give up its energy
and momentum. This is how you get the radiation to stop going in the direction it was
going.
Now X-rays typically interact with matter (atoms) in one of three ways:
At low energies you can have the photoelectric effect: the energy of the radiation is
completely absorbed by the electrons of the atom - so the photon "disappears" and the
electron gets all the energy (minus whatever energy was needed to get it detached from
the atom - the bonding energy). Electrons don't travel very far in matter, so the energy is
usually absorbed once a photoelectric interaction occurs. The probability of this
interaction depends on the energy of the photon and the Z (atomic number) of the atom
- higher Z means much higher probability (I have seen Z4 relationships but I'm not sure
how well those hold, and over what range.)
As the energy of the photon increases above the K-edge of the atom, you get Compton
scatter dominating: this is an elastic collision between the photon and the electrons in
the material and it results in a transfer of momentum and energy from the photon to the
electron. The famous Compton equation shows the relationship between incident and
final energy of the photon as:

Where m0 is the rest mass of the electron and is the angle between the incident
photon with energy Eand final energy E.
The more electrons there are in your material, the more effective the stopping power in
this range (above 80 keV or so). This is why lead, depleted uranium, bismuth, tungsten,
and other such materials are good for shielding.
At very high energies, you can get pair production: the photon (with more than 1.022
MeV energy) creates an electron/positron pair "out of thin air", giving up 1.022 MeV of
energy (which is turned into mass of the particles created).
So to recap: X-rays shielding works by interaction of electrons with photons. Higher
density materials improve the probability of Compton scatter; higher atomic number
increase photoelectric interaction cross section. Typically, one talks about the half value
thickness: the thickness of material that stops half the radiation. Because shielding is a
probabilistic process, there is no such thing as "perfect shielding".

One more point about density of the shielding material:

In some situations, you care about stopping the radiation in the shortest possible
distance. This happens for example in a radiation pinhole camera (used in SPECT
systems), where you want to have a small opening to let radiation through, but need to
stop all radiation outside of that. Such an aperture has to be made of the densest high-Z
material you can find. People usually choose gold for this application
(http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=949378) - the figure of merit
here is the product of density and specific scatter cross section, the linear attenuation
coefficient with units of m1. The larger this number, the more efficient the material at
stopping radiation in a short distance. A couple of examples (all values at 100 keV,
attenuation data from http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Xcom/xcom2-t):

As you can see, for this particular example the shortest stopping length is obtained for
iridium - because although it has a lower Z than gold, it has higher density.
When you are interested in "bulk radiation protection", for example in nuclear reactors,
then the question is simply "how do I get a lot of shielding for not a lot of money". Now
the size of the shield does not matter very much, and you end up with water - a very
cheap and abundant material which is capable of stopping radiation (not just gamma
rays, but neutrons as well). This is the material of choice for shielding (spent) reactor
fuel. You may have seen the pictures of the blue-glowing fuel rods under water: