Hello Marcia. Go ahead and think of it that way. Imagine the airplane is coasting thru space. No thrust from the engines, no lift for the wings. Now the guys jump out the back but there is no air to inflate the parachutes, or even to wiggle a piece of yarn attached to their space suit.

You have just described what happens during an EVA on the space shuttle. The only danger of being swept away is because of a push off against the shuttle itself, or a runaway thruster. Same thing applies whether it is a piece of frozen oxygen or a piece of mylar, ice crystal, dust or smoke. It all just drifts around. The only way things ever spread out is due to diffusion, which in simplest terms is molecules bouncing off of each other until they are so widespread that they seldom bump into anything anymore.

Usually when I see something impossible happen right in front of my eyes it is due to my eyes not seeing everything, and my mind trying to put a reasonable explanation on an unreasonable action. Sometimes what we think we see isn't what we are seeing at all.

It could be that the old theories on comets is correct. But I need to see some evidence of solar wind acting on a known object.

I once built a supposed proof of solar wind. I put a pin in a jar with a tooth pick slightly stuck on the tip and balanced there. On each end of the toothpick was an eqally sized piece of paper. One side of the paper was black, the other was white. I then mounted this assembly inside a canning jar and evacuated it with a hand pump similar to the pump used to inflate a blood pressure cuff. I smugly announced that the spinning toothpick prooved the power of solar wind, or of photons striking the dark sided paper and being absorbed, and bouncing off of the white side. I got a little ribbon for the explanation and for my cheap way of reproducing and possibly plegerizing somebody elses' study. Many years later I came to understand that the evacuated jar wasn't evacuated at all. It simply had fewer air molecules than the air outside the jar. The spinning was due to radiant heat of the dark paper as opposed to the white paper exciting the few remaining molecules of air and causing the tooth pick to spin.

Don't get me wrong, I think solar wind exists, but mainly within the corona of the sun. Every other example of usefull motion from photonic energy has come up way short of usefull, or even reproduceable results. Certainly not enough to move tons of dust to significant speeds.

Dan