The study of open charm meson production provides an efficient tool for the investigation of the properties of hot and dense matter formed in nucleus-nucleus collisions. The interpretation of the existing di-muon data from the CERN SPS suffers from a lack of knowledge on the mechanism and properties of the open charm particle production. Due to this, the heavy-ion programme of the \NASixtyOne experiment at the CERN SPS has been extended by precise measurements of charm hadrons with short lifetimes. A new Vertex Detector for measurements of the rare processes of open charm production in nucleus-nucleus collisions was designed to meet the challenges of track registration and high resolution in primary and secondary vertex reconstruction. A small-acceptance version of the vertex detector was installed in 2016 and tested with Pb+Pb collisions at 150\AGeVc. It was also operating during the physics data taking on Xe+La and Pb+Pb collisions at 150\AGeVc conducted in 2017 and 2018. This paper presents the detector design and construction, data calibration, event reconstruction, and analysis procedure.
Comment: 13 pages, 21 figures, Fixed Acknowledgment