No, I didn't know what you did in life as we know it. Cool! This might be too much info, but since it's on its own thread, the world can skip it if they like.
It's a near-IR spectrometer. I'd suppose that it looks for the asbestos spectrum by hitting things with IR from a bulb (something incandescents still rule for), and helps out the operator a little by having stored spectra for it and other common building materials. Something uncommon might fool it. I didn't register for more information, but spec sheets for things like this you have to read for what's *not* in them to get the real skinny, it can be a lot of work to know what *should* be there, but isn't.
Without doing some more background work - even I don't know everything already - I'd say it's probably good for what they say it is, but is possible to be fooled. Fisher is a good outfit, if high priced. NIR spectra can get pretty complex and the addition of a little human judgment would seem to be required at least some of the time, as it is in other spectrometry.
Personally, I'd add a decent pocket microscope as asbestos has a pretty recognizable look in a matrix, and after a little study of it and some non-containing examples, you'd be a lot more sure. Quicker and cheaper too. But for a lot of this kind of work, that's not really the issue.
If it was me in this case, I'd be looking not so much at the materials alone, but the dust in pockets around them - anywhere dust collects - as you point out, it's the asbestos getting loose that is the problem - so the reasonable thing would be to check if that's happening or not, by looking at what does get loose and seeing if there's asbestos in it! This is entirely too reasonable for the guys writing regs to have thought of it, probably.
But it might help you select when to do the more extensive and expensive tests, since you obviously DO have some judgment.
// background
For those who don't know why asbestos is an issue - it's a very inert substance - so far, so good. It has a very needle-like crystal structure and habit - fibrous. Since it's inert, once it gets into your lungs, your body doesn't know how to "eat" it, and it's hard to cough up, as the pointy fibers embed in tissue well. Being there and being "not you", your body reacts to it and tries to get rid of it. This produces a lot of cell death at first, creating more junk, and that pointy stuff keeps puncturing more cells and causing them to die (they self-destruct). Mostly, the body eventually gets smart and just coats the junk with scar tissue, bad, but not too bad unless there's a lot of it. The real threat is if it just keeps killing cells (plain old mechanical damage here - the stuff really is pretty inert). This means more cell replication. More cell replication means more chances of a transcription error in the DNA - more error means more chance of cancer as a result.
Enough of this scar tissue can be disabling (same idea as silicosis and black lung), and frankly, most of the cancers "caused" by this were well after the other damage got to be pretty bad anyway and also happened in the presence of other cancer causing agents (smoking, for one). Society went way overboard on this one in my opinion, but that's me. Simple breathing masks when dealing with a lot of junk in the air would have sufficed as a preventative measure in a lot of cases. And doh, packaging anything you're using so it doesn't fill the air with dust would have been a pretty basic idea.
As a result of early sloppy and ill considered remediation efforts, probably more damage was done to humans than just leaving things alone until it was time to replace them anyway - tearing all this junk out puts more of it into the air to be ingested, duh. Took a few decades for anyone to figure this obvious idea out, though.
The lawsuits nearly ruined (actually did bankrupt) the best and most responsible firms (B&W) in the power plant business, where they really do have a good use for this stuff (other things melt at those temperatures), and cost everyone a ton of money - even you and me - power companies have state-guaranteed profit no matter what their costs are. Lawyers are still ambulance-chasing this one decades later, trying to get that last buck before all the possible subjects die of old age.
// A note on the regs in general:
Governments have this problem - they can't control too well how diligent, or effectively smart, their people are. The regs have to be written for the expected worst case of those implementing them. This leads to some apparently stupid rules, but on reflection, maybe not so much.
Example - in the NEC (electrical code) it's against code to solder junctions and outlets. Any competent technician knows that solder is better than none for contact resistance and in general would be safer - if it's a good solder joint and the mechanical prep is also good.
But, you can't expect your run of the mill, highly paid inspector to have a clue what a good solder joint looks like, it's possible to hide bad mechanical prep behind one, and the next guy who comes in to change something might not know how to (un- and re-) solder.
So, they're banned. A lot of my wiring is soldered anyway - an advantage of being off the grid and permit free is you can go ahead and do things right.
Regs in general attempt (and usually fail) to remove as much human judgment as possible from the equation. Drop-down check lists - no essay questions. Very pessimistic about the human race and its abilities. Whether that is a good assessment or not, well, maybe.
But of course, this philosophical failure of regs is one of the reasons we had this "financial engineering" made possible - as a way to get around a simple drop-down list - easy to violate the spirit without violating the letter of the law when the laws are written as they are.
From what I've so far seen on XRF (learning how to make a cheap one for us!) they use some slick shortcuts in most machines - only look at one possible line for each possible element, out of many more possible. This simplification makes it more likely to be fooled - but possible to do for a price. A lot of human skull-sweat went into picking which lines - the ones least likely to be mis-classified with a limited resolution thing and so on, but by tossing out a lot of info to make the computer's job easier, we've, well, tossed out a lot of information. Most semi-automated spectroscopy things do the same, which can lead to errors. I run into this all the time with my mass spectrometers and gamma spectrometers.
There is always some overlap - some things have a huge number of spectral lines, and in a complex mix there's always going to be some overlap with finite resolution. At that point, to do it right you'd have to bring in the big math guns - auto-correlations and template subtractions to look at things like do the lines from this one thing have the right brightness ratios - the problem goes NP-complete fast.
I'm right now answering a related question on another forum, about a guy wondering if a single spurious line in a deuterium gas spectrum is an indication of tungsten contamination of his plasma. It's going to be tough to get this guy a good answer - tungsten has 100's of resolvable lines!
He's seeing just one in a normal deuterium spectrum. So, off to the tables
I go and see if maybe this is the brightest line for tungsten (could the other lines be there but too dim for him to see?), or if he should be also seeing other lines that should be brighter if it's really that, and so on ad nauseaum. If tungsten is really there - a bunch of its other lines ought to be there too, and he's not reporting that as of now. A computerized thing trying to do this job would probably fail at this point, depending on which line they'd picked to be "tungsten" - and it can't have the a priori knowledge we have in this case of (most of) what it could possibly be in a stainless steel tank with ceramic, a gas of ?? purity, and yes, tungsten present.
//
On a funny note there though - a real "think of the children" disaster in the Md school system a couple years back. A kid brings in an old mercury thermometer for show and tell - and breaks it. Mercury gets away of course (the amount in a thermometer). They bring in full decontamination teams - space suits and the whole shebang, to clean it up so the kids don't ingest mercury (which is hard to ingest if you can't even get it off the floor, it's dangerous when in organic compound form, but not as metal or oxide).
They have all this space-age stuff - mass spectrometers and other things, totally state of the art. They wind up shutting down the school for nearly a month chasing mercury, because with this parts-per-trillion stuff, there is no place in the school or on the grounds that doesn't measure some - the idea that there's always some Hg in the environment (more near a coal plant) skipped right past the limited minds of these highly paid inspectors, and of course, not knowing what "normal" was, they had no clue when to declare success (and no motivation, being paid by the time on the job). So the kids lose a month of school, a month of operation expenses is wasted, with extra for that team - total fail, but we sure "thought of the children", didn't we? Remember, we are talking about a total amount here about the same as in one old-style tooth filling, spread over an entire school classroom at worst, spread wider more probably eventually (it has a vapor pressure and evaporates in time) - so no big dose for any single human was even possible from the outset.
The broken window fallacy in operation?
It's a memory not many people will likely have, in the future.