I'm thinking of the way the heat shield reaches very high temperatures. If you had a block of ice in space and if fell to earth as it came into the atmosphere what would happen to it would it heat up and then freeze again?
as i comes down it will get hotter and hotter because the lower the denser the atmosphere and the more friction. if it is small it will just melt to nothing and if big enough what is left will hit earth and be called a meteorite. this is more or less what happens to a commet exept that it is the sun that makes it melt