<p>Rock joint properties are critical for geotechnical assessments and for evaluating the hydraulic and mechanical state of rock masses. Traditional field-based techniques for assessing these properties often show biased, inconsistent, and low-accuracy results. To address these limitations, this study investigates the use of hand-held, metrology-grade 3D laser scanning technology to extract joint properties from drill cores. This paper proposes detailed methods to estimate joint aperture and roughness from scan data. The joint aperture estimation involved the analysis of joint images obtained from scans, while joint roughness was assessed by calculating the Joint Roughness Coefficient (JRC) from statistical roughness parameters. Furthermore, the application of these properties in estimating joint permeability was studied. This work highlights the importance of accurate and consistent drill core data collection, which can be achieved with laser scanning, and later used for various purposes in engineering design.</p>